ABOUT THE BLOGGER

Monday, 23 January 2017

Doğan Davit Akman (d.o.b 1940) was born and raised In Istanbul, Turkey (formerly the Ottoman Empire) where his paternal forebears settled upon being expelled from Spain in 1492 for choosing to retain their religion rather than to convert. His maternal forebears on the paternal side settled in the Ottoman Empire upon being expelled from the Puglia region of southern Italy by the same King Ferdinand II who along with his wife Queen Isabella  made a career of expelling first, the Jews from Spain, Sardinia, Sicily followed by the expulsion of the Moors and Arabs. His maternal forebears  appear to have originally hailed from Poland, sought and were granted refuge in the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Sultan Suleiman I, the Magnificient a.k.a the Law Giver and ultimately settled in Ottoman Bulgaria.

He arrived in Montreal in 1957 upon completion of his secondary schooling. in French at St. Michel, a school run by Christian Brothers. During the first seven years, he was employed as a production control assistant in a sweat shop; as a warehouse clerk in a department store; a traffic clerk in international maritime shipping; a cub reporter; a taxi driver; a summer intern at a maximum security penitentiary where one of the fringe benefits was to get free haircuts and shaves from a barber serving a life sentence for arson and murder. Upon completing his university education (Université de Montréal, University of Pennsylvania, McGill University), he was successively appointed as a lecturer at one university and then as assistant professor at two universities. He taught sociology, criminology, social policy and research methods. Switching from academics to law, he was appointed a Stipendiary lay Magistrate in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, the title later being re-designated as Judge of the Provincial Court . In 1978, he moved to Ottawa to chair appeal boards at the Public Service Commission of Canada. In 1979, he joined the Federal Department of Justice where he was assigned to handle criminal prosecutions out of the Saskatchewan regional office of the Department. In 1985, he returned to Ottawa and was  assigned to the civil ligitation branch where he specialised  in handling lawsuits brought against Canada by some of Canada’s First Nations based on claims of Aboriginal Title to land, Aboriginal Rights; breaches of Treaty and statutory rights.  He retired from the Department of Justice in 2007. Since then, he has been reading and reflecting a great deal on some of the broad and specific developments in Canada, the United States, Western Europe and the Middle East and published some articles in addition to those he published earlier during his professional career.