Government work Matas served as a Law Clerk to the
Chief Justice of Canada in 1968–69, and was a member of the Foreign Ownership Working Group,
Government of Canada, and was special assistant to the
Solicitor General of Canada in 1971–72. He served as a member of the Canadian delegation to the
United Nations General Assembly, the Task Force on Immigration Practices & Procedures, the Canadian delegation to the United Nations Conference on an
International Criminal Court 1998, the Canadian Delegation to the Stockholm International Forum on the
Holocaust, and from 1997 until 2003, the
Director of the International Centre for Human Rights & Democratic Development. On 13 November 2009, Matas was appointed to the board of this centre, also known as Rights and Democracy (R&D), which was headed by Professor Aural Braun. Shortly afterwards, a number of illicit actions by the staff of R&D and secret grants to radical organizations were exposed, and Matas joined Braun in initiating a major investigation. As a result of the investigations, funding was cut and in 2012, the government closed the Rights and Democracy framework.
Teaching work Matas has also taught
constitutional law at
McGill University, Introductory Economics, Canadian Economic Problems,
International Law,
Civil Liberties, and
Immigration & Refugee Law, at the University of Manitoba.
Politics David Matas ran for the
House of Commons of Canada in the
1979 and
1980 federal elections as a
Liberal candidate in
Winnipeg—Assiniboine district and came in second place both times. In 2009, Matas was a signatory to a letter opposing the appointment of
Christine Chinkin to a UN
Human Rights Council fact finding mission on the 2008-2009
Gaza War (also known as the Goldstone Commission), alleging that Chinkin signed a prejudicial letter that indicated that, without examining the evidence, she "concluded that Israel was acting contrary to international law." Chinkin did not resign, and endorsed the UN
report, which was later denounced as biased and ill-informed by one of its authors, Judge Goldstone. The report's other authors stand by its content and criticized Goldstone's reversal of position on it. In his book "Aftershock: Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism", Matas accused critics of
Israel's post-1967 war policies regarding the
West Bank of having double standards in not also criticizing
China's occupation of
Tibet.
Human rights work He has been actively involved as Director of the International Defence & Aid Fund for
South Africa in Canada, Director of Canada-South Africa Cooperation, Co-chair Canadian
Helsinki Watch Group, Director Manitoba Association of Rights & Liberties,
Amnesty International, B'nai Brith Canada, the
Canadian Bar Association, the
International Commission of Jurists,
Canadian Jewish Congress, and
Canadian Council for Refugees. He represented
Lai Changxing in his extradition proceedings. He is also counsel for
Justice for Jews from Arab Countries and is co-author of "Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: The Case for Rights and Redress". He presented various papers on the legal issue of prosecuting war criminals in Bangladesh.
Organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners in China In 2006, with
David Kilgour he released the
Kilgour-Matas report, which stated "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained" and "we believe that there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling
Falun Gong practitioners". They visited about 50 countries to raise awareness of the situation. In 2012,
State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China, edited by Matas and Torsten Trey, was published with essays from Gabriel Danovitch, Professor of Medicine,
Arthur Caplan, Professor of Bioethics, Jacob Lavee, cardiothoracic surgeon, Ghazali Ahmad, Maria Fiatarone Singh, Torsten Trey,
Ethan Gutmann and Matas. ==CBA Committee on the Constitution==