56 Saturday December 18 2021 | the timesWo r l d
5Judge rules
Sacklers can
be sued over
opioid scandal
At least 90 statues, including one of Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia, were
removed last year with artists, museums and collectors bidding for themHundreds of Confederate statues and
monuments toppled across America
have become the focus of a bidding war
as debate rages over what do with them.
This summer, officials in Charlottes-
ville, Virginia, offered to give away two
statues of Confederate generals Robert
E Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jack-
son, whose removal sparked the “Unite
the Right” rally by white supremacists
that left one person dead in 2017. The
city council received offers to take the
monuments off their hands from art-
ists, museums and collectors, with con-
trasting ideas of what to do with them.
The Ratcliffe Foundation, which
runs a museum at the former Virginia
home of a brother of the Confederate
general J E B Stuart, offered $50,000
for the pair. To fill out a planned sculp-
ture garden, the foundation also asked
the city of Richmond for all its Confed-
erate cast-offs, since at least 18 statues
were removed across the Virginia state
capital in the past year.
The foundation was outbid by LAX-
ART, an arts group based in Los Ange-
les, which offered $100,000 for the two
Charlottesville statues, to be displayed
at an exhibition of black modern art
next year.
In the end, the council split the two
statues up. The bronze of Stonewall
Jackson on his horse will appear in Los
Angeles alongside other Confederate
monuments and works by black artists
in 2022.
“We are hoping to question the geo-
graphically specific context for these
statues as well as the role they play in
discussions about race, gender, censor-
ship and American history,” said Ham-
za Walker, director of LAXART.
The half-ton statue of Lee was givenGeneral Lee to
be melted down
in name of art
to a local centre for African-American
heritage, which plans to melt it down to
create a new artwork.
The decision has revived debate over
what to do with Confederate symbols of
slavery, as dozens are torn down across
America, with at least 90 removed from
state capitol buildings, universities and
city parks last year.
Calls to preserve them in museums
were once cast as a flimsy compromise
by racist apologists but the debate was
largely academic as just four Confeder-
ate monuments were removed
between 1923 and 2015. As the move-
ment to destroy the works and the
backlash by white nationalist groups
has grown after Donald Trump was
elected president in 2016, however, the
discussion on how, or whether, to pre-
serve them has become more nuanced.
Many museums are reluctant to take
the statues, wary of becoming a place of
pilgrimage for white supremacists. The
city of Charleston, South Carolina, re-
moved a statue of the former vice-
president John Calhoun, a staunch de-
fender of slavery, during the Black Lives
Matter protests after the murder of Ge-
orge Floyd last year. The council of-
fered the work to a local museum,
which declined. Calhoun has been in
storage ever since.
LAXART, which has asked to borrow
the Calhoun statute for next year’s
show, says displaying the works in a
new context can drive debate on how to
tackle racism. “It is the monument’s his-
torical and its present-day ideological
bearing that needs to be investigated,”
Walker wrote to Charleston city
council, in a letter seen by Bloomberg.
Another bronze of Lee on horseback,
removed from a park in Dallas in 2017,
was auctioned online and sold for $1.4
million. It adorns a putting green at a
Texas golf resort.United States
Hugh Tomlinson WashingtonA federal judge in America has over-
turned a $4.5 billion bankruptcy settle-
ment between Purdue Pharma, the
makers of OxyContin, and the Sackler
family which owns the company,
designed to shield them from civil law-
suits over their role in the opioid crisis.
Purdue sought bankruptcy protec-
tion in 2019 as it faced allegations it had
lobbied doctors to needlessly prescribe
OxyContin, fuelling the opioid crisis
that has killed more than 500,000
Americans over the past two decades.
Through a bankruptcy court, the
Sacklers agreed a settlement in which
the family would give up ownership of
Purdue and be protected from personal
lawsuits over their role in the crisis. The
company agreed to donate profits to
fighting the drug crisis but continued to
manufacture opioids.
Several state attorneys have chal-
lenged the deal, however, and on
Thursday, District Judge Colleen
McMahon in New York threw out the
immunity settlement, ruling that it was
not permitted because the Sacklers had
not declared bankruptcy themselves.
Purdue said it will appeal against the
ruling, but it opens the door to lawsuits
targeting the Sacklers themselves.
Letitia James, the attorney general of
New York, said that she was ready to re-
sume a civil lawsuit against the family.
“Purdue Pharma and the Sackler
family remain named defendants in our
ongoing litigation and we will hold
them accountable for their unlawful
behaviour,” she said.
General William Tong, the attorney
general of Connecticut, called the rul-
ing “a seismic victory for justice and ac-
countability”. Tong said the verdict will
“re-open the deeply flawed Purdue
bankruptcy and force the Sackler
family to confront the pain and devas-
tation they have caused”.
America’s opioid crisis continues to
escalate, with a record 100,000 deaths
from drug overdoses in a year.Hugh Tomlinson WashingtonEZE AMOS; WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGEST
he dismissal of a Canadian
teacher for wearing a hijab
has provoked fierce
condemnation of Quebec’s
ban on religious symbols
and anger towards Justin Trudeau
for his refusal to intervene.
The law, known as Bill 21, passed
in 2019, bans the hijab, turban and
kippah for public servants in
“positions of authority”, including
police officers, lawyers, judges and
teachers. Critics say it targets
minorities under the guise of
secularism and is discriminatory.
While rights groups and Quebec’s
right-wing government have long
slugged it out in the courts and in
public forums, most Canadians had
not seen the law in action until this
month, when Fatemeh Anvari, a
primary school teacher in Chelsea,
Quebec, was sacked. WhileTrudeau refuses to take on Quebec in hijab teacher row
employees hired before the law’s
passage could continue wearing
religious symbols, Anvari, previously
a substitute teacher, was given a
full-time contract in October.
The idea of a popular Muslim
teacher being booted out of a
classroom in a country run by a
global progressive has
enraged rights groups
and the wider public
and prompted
protests at Anvari’s
school, including
by pupils and
staff. “We love
you Ms
Fatemeh,” one
child scrawled
on a sign.
In an interview
with CTV News,
Anvari said she did
not want to become
the story. “I don’t want
this to be a personal thing
because that won’t do any good to
anyone,” she said. “I want this to be
something in which we all think
about how big decisions affect otherlives.” On Wednesday Trudeau, who
rose to power in 2015 promising a
“feminist” foreign policy and a
gender-balanced cabinet, thundered
in parliament: “I don’t think that in
a free and democratic society, a
person should lose their job because
of their religion.”
Yet he has repeatedly
refused to intervene,
saying the matter
should be handled
provincially and
that a fight
between Ottawa
and Quebec
would be
unhelpful. Still,
he has not ruled
it out.
Critics say the
prime minister,
who heads up a
minority government,
is wary of alienating
Quebec’s electorate, which is
vital to his success at the ballot box,
and of the Francophone province’s
history of secessionism. Many fume
that Quebec is treated differently
from other provinces.
Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the
leftwing New Democrats, who shoreup Trudeau’s Liberals in parliament,
said that Anvari had been sacked
“because of the way she looked” and
that he supported federal
intervention in the law.
The mayor of Brampton, a diverse
Toronto suburb, has called on 100
fellow mayors to “join the fight”
against Bill 21. The Conservative MP
Kyle Seeback said Anvari’s
reassignment to a diversity-focused
literacy project was “an absolute
disgrace” although the Conservative
leader, Erin O’Toole, is not willing to
intervene.
François Legault, Quebec’s hugely
popular premier, insists that Bill 21
is “a reasonable law” that reaffirms
the separation of church and state.
Anvari, he said, should not have
been hired in the first place.
Experts say the law’s roots lie in
the 1960s Quiet Revolution, when
Quebec wrested control from the
once-powerful Catholic Church, and
waves of migration from North
Africa in the 1990s. Legault has
boosted his support by presenting
Quebec’s culture and language as
under threat.
Legal attempts by rights groups to
block Bill 21, which invoked the
rarely used “notwithstandingclause” allowing provinces to
override Canada’s charter of rights,
have failed.
Now, though, Anvari’s sacking and
a tidal wave of public anger have
given fresh life to the law’s
opponents and fuelled calls for
Trudeau’s government to intervene
and take Quebec to court.
Razia Hamid, 37, left Quebec for
Brampton a few months after Bill 21
became law, ending an 11-year
stint in the French-speaking
province.
“It’s what [the law] represents: to
live in a province that has created a
tiered society,” she told The Times.
“Making individuals choose
between their identity and their
work is not a choice anyone should
have to make.” She said the law
institutionalised racism and made
her feel less safe.
Hamid, who does advocacy and
works as a marriage counsellor,
added she was disheartened by
Trudeau’s refusal to act when rights
were being infringed.
“All these leaders are going to
have to answer for which side of
history they want to stand on when
this dark period is spoken about,”
she said.Charlie
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vitaltohissuccessatPupils protested when Fatemeh Anvari
fell foul of the ban on religious symbols