Saudi activist flogged outside mosque in Jeddahhttp://topnews-uk.com/top-news/saudi-activist-flogged-outside-mosque-in-jeddah-alarabiya

Witnesses said that Badawi, 30, was flogged after the weekly Friday prayers near al-Jafali mosque.Staff Writer, Al Arabiya NewsFriday, 9 January 2015Saudi blogger Raef Badawi was flogged in public Friday near a mosque in the Red Sea city of Jeddah,receiving 50 lashes for "insulting Islam," news agency AFP said.In September, a Saudi court upheld a sentence of 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for Badawi, and he is expected to have 20 weekly

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whipping sessions until his punishment is complete.The United States, Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have denounced the flogging, and said Badawi was exercising his right to freedom of expression.Witnesses said that Badawi, 30, was flogged after the weekly Friday prayers near al-Jafali mosque as a crowd of worshippers looked on.Badawi was driven to the sitein a police car, and taken out of the vehicle as a government employee read out the charges against him to the crowd.

 

Last Update: Saturday, 10 January 2015 KSA 06:35 - GMT 03:35

ARE INSULTS OF RELIGIONSPROTECTED FREE SPEECH?

Pope Francis On Charlie Hebdo: 'You Cannot Insult The Faith Of Others'

 |  By Nicole WinfieldPosted: 01/15/2015 9:13 am EST Updated: 3 hours ago

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/15/pope-francis-charlie-hebdo_n_6478104.html?utm_hp_ref=media&ir=Media

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) - Pope Francis said Thursday there are limits to freedom of expression, especially when it insults or ridicules someone's faith.

Francis spoke about the Paris terror attacks while en route to the Philippines, defending free speech as not only a fundamental human right but a duty to speak one's mind for the sake of the common good.

But he said there were limits.

By way of example, he referred to Alberto Gasparri, who organizes papal trips and was standing by his side aboard the papal plane.

"If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch," Francis said, throwing a pretend punch his way.

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"It's normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

Many people around the world have defended the right of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to publish inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed in the wake of the massacre by Islamic extremists at its Paris offices and subsequent attack on a kosher supermarket in which three gunmen killed 17 people.

But recently the Vatican and four prominent French imams issued a joint declaration that denounced the attacks but also urged the media to treat religions with respect.

Francis, who has urged Muslim leaders in particular to speak out against Islamic extremism, went a step further when asked by a French journalist about whether there were limits when freedom of expression meets freedom of religion.

Francis insisted that it was an "aberration" to kill in the name of God and said religion can never be used to justify violence.

But he said there was a limit to free speech when it concerned offending someone's religious beliefs.

"There are so many people who speak badly about

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religions or other religions, who make fun of them, who make a game out of the religions of others," he said. "They are provocateurs. And what happens to them is what would happen to Dr.Gasparri if he says a curse word against my mother. There is a limit."

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the Vatican has sought to downplay reports that it is a potential target for Islamic extremists, saying it is being vigilant but has received no specific threat.

Francis said he was concerned primarily for the faithful, and said he had spoken to Vatican security officials who are taking "prudent and secure measures."

"I am worried, but you know I have a defect: a good dose of carelessness. I'm careless about these things," he said. But he admitted that in his prayers, he had asked that if something wereto happen to him that "it doesn't hurt, because I'm not very courageous when it comes to pain. I'm very timid."

He added, "I'm in God's hands."

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James Grant Matkin ·Yes of course there are limits to free speech, but the issue is do insults of religion in cartoons cross the line. I think not. More importantly if you think such cartoons making fun of others sacred beliefs are over the line what are the consequences? The law does draw a line at shouting fire in a crowded theatre because this may cause death or injury. Do insults of religion by way of satirical cartoons go too far - surely not as a matter oflaw. Outdated blasphemy laws are about punishing insults of religion as a crime. Sadly while many nations have repealed these archaic crimes others have not. Today a young blogger in Saudi Arabia is sentenced to 1000 lashes (50 administered yesterday) for insulting Islam. Surely the Pope is not advocating blasphemy laws and punishment when he asks for limits on insults when there are more than 100,000 potential religions to be offended?

The United Kingdom abolished its laws against blasphemy inEngland and Wales in 2008 with the passage of the CriminalJustice and Immigration Act.[1] W In the United States, for example, a prosecution for blasphemy would violate theConstitution according to the 1952 Supreme Court case Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson. W.In Europe, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has recommended that countries enact laws that protect the freedom of expression.In many countries either there are no laws against blasphemy, or long-established laws are no longer

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enforced.. All of the developed Western world and East Asian developed democracies like Japan and Taiwan, blasphemy laws, when existent, are largely de facto dead letter. W.Yet as of 2014 in some jurisdictions the death penalty maybe applicable to blasphemy. W.

In place of, or in addition to, prohibitions against blasphemy, some countries have laws, which give redress tothose who feel insulted on account of their religion. These laws forbid hate speech, the vilification of religion, or "religious insult". In my opinion the law should abandon this field and leave limits of insulting speech as a matter of respect and common sense. Following the Charlie Hebdo tragedy many cartoonist are limiting their satire by not lampooning the prophet Mohammed. The cartoon satire is intended to offend and make a point. Disrespect is the essence of the cartoonist’s pencil. After the Paris tragedy one key Muslim leader called for reform of Islam as a religion. Dalil Boubakeur Muslim Rector of the Great Mosque in Paris interviewed by Chritiane Amanpour. appealed “for a reform of Islam to abandon political Islam and become a religion of peace andtolerance. He said we should live together under the ethicof democracy and humanism.” Yes. Hear Hear.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/video/us/french-muslim-leader-calls-to-abandon-political-islam/vp-AA84UuJ

Michael Hipp · Top Commenter"You cannot make fun of the faith of others."

Oh yes you can. There are limits on free speech, but thoselimits do not start just because somebody is offended by

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what you say. Free speech limits are like yelling fire in the theatre.

Hey Pope, you're not infallible - your fairy sky daddy is just that, a fairy sky daddy that neither deserves nor will ever get my respect or adoration.Reply · Unlike · 104 · Unfollow Post · Edited · 4 hours ago

Dieter Zerressen · Top CommenterSorry but he's wrong. Free speech doesn't have a death sentence and making fun of someone's religion is part of life. Throughout history religious speech has caused the death of millions, that's where the problems lie. Cartoonsnever killed anyone but religion certainly has. If you don't like the magazine, don't buy it.Reply · Unlike · 67 · Follow Post · 4 hours ago

Chris Selley: Why Canada’s media won’t show the Charlie Hebdo pictures

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Republish ReprintChris Selley | January 13, 2015 | Last Updated: Jan 13 8:00 AM ETMore from Chris Selley | @cselley

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/13/chris-selley-why-canadas-media-wont-show-the-charlie-hebdo-pictures/

MICHAL CIZEK/AFP/Getty ImagesMany suggest the media is too afraid of death to print Charlie Hebdo's controversial covers. I just think they're afraid of offending anyone.

Lik

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e

Twitter Google+ Reddit Email Comments MoreThose who hate the mainstream media for sport have had a fun week. Two men murdered 12 people in Paris, including most of the staff of a magazine, to avenge satirical depictions of the prophet Mohammed. And wouldthe media dare print those depictions in solidarity, or simply to illustrate the news?Like fun they would. Snivelling cowards, the lot of them.

Charlie Hebdo’s new issue includes imageof Prophet MohammedThis week’s issue of Charlie Hebdo will include images of the Prophet Mohammed as the satirical newspaper says it will not back down from blasphemydespite the horrific attack that killed 10 of its staffers.

“We will not give in. The spirit of ‘I am Charlie’ means the right to blaspheme,” lawyer Richard Malkatold French radio Monday.

He added that the front-page of the Wednesday edition would be released tonight.

Cathy Ola, the manager of Gateway Newstands in Toronto says she ordered 80 copies of this week’s Charlie Hebdo magazine, but the distributor, LMPI, could only provide her with 50. Ola says the magazine should come in on Friday.

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Continue reading…I’m not here to pile on; I’ve no high horse to ride. The National Post printed the Charlie Hebdo covers; but back in 2006 (before my time) it did not print the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, which played precisely the same role in the story. The glory of a free press is that no outlet — no privately held one, anyway — has any obligation to print anything, or indeed to explain itself. If thesubscribers don’t like it, they have easy andobvious recourse.

Indeed, if outlets like CBC, The New York Times and The Globe and Mail had just kept schtum, I don’t think I’d have a lot to say about it. Iwas disappointed and genuinely surprised: I thought most in the Western media saw the Danish cartoons episode as a bit of an embarrassment, best not repeated. But it wasn’t the end of the world.

They didn’t keep schtum, though. They tried to explain. And in some cases they did an alarmingly bad job of it.

Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, told Politico’s Dylan Byers that it was “pretty simple”: “We don’t run things that are designed to gratuitously offend.” It’s a highly debatable policy in theory. And

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in practice, the Internet quickly set to workcataloguing all the things the Times had run over the years that were designed to gratuitously offend — an Iranian cartoon in which a Jewish man draws fake outlines of dead bodies while two others hold up a bannerreading “holocaust,” for example.

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People have accused CBC of similar inconsistency. In a feature on the media controversy over whether to publish Charlie Hebdo‘s Islamic-themed cartoons, The National showed us a cover in which the Pope holds up a condom in place of the host, and another depicting Jesus as the guest of honour in Dîner des Cons, a French film about wealthy people who compete to invite the stupidest person to a weekly dinner party — but none depicting Mohammed. It’s almost funny, it’s so baldfaced.

But in fact, at times at least, our public broadcaster has been relatively plain-spoken:According to David Studer, the network’s director of journalistic standards and

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practices, CBC enforces one standard for images involving Islam and a different standard for other religions. “A part of our job as Canada’s national broadcaster is to promote tolerance and respect and to recognize that unlike some other religions, where you see statues and you see pictures ofdeities, it’s one of the tenets of Islam thatthe Prophet not be depicted in pictures or cartoons,” he said.

Not all Muslims are in agreement on that point, incidentally. The Koran is certainly concerned with idolatry, Sameer Rahim argues in a piece this week for Prospect magazine, but“nothing in the Koran forbids image-making.” Furthermore, I imagine a great many Muslims in the West who do object on principle to depictions of Mohammed are not such delicate flowers as to be reduced to tears of rage by a magazine cover reproduced in a newspaper inthe context of a mass murder — and might not desire such obsequious deference, especially after the violence in Paris.

Raw: Arsonists Attack German Newspaper

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If you ask me, the public broadcaster shouldn’t be filtering news according to religious sensibilities. It shouldn’t be in the theology game at all. But at least we know where CBC stands. If only we could say the same for Canada’s self-styled newspaper of record.

“One doesn’t need to show a cartoon to show the story. The story is the killings, not anycartoon,” said Globe and Mail editor-in-chief David Walmsley, quoted by the paper’s public editor, Sylvia Stead. That’s defensible. But

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one can’t help noticing Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons are all over the Globe‘s website: A cartoon mocking author Michel Houellebecq, who predicts a Muslim revolution in France; acartoon of a Muslim man sloppily kissing the personification of Charlie Hebdo; a cartoon mocking Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people in southwest France in 2012 before a police sniper got him.

So the magazine’s cartoons are clearly usefulfor the Globe‘s illustrative purposes … just not the cartoons that are most directly related to the story at hand. And Ms. Stead isn’t much help clarifying the point. While neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the paper’s decision, she did say she appreciatedan online backgrounder and its “accompanying examples of cartoons that do not include the Prophet Mohammed.”

Many have suggested the media are simply afraid of radical Islamists. I’m not so sureHere she just sashays past the nub of the issue: Why publish some cartoons but not others, in inverse proportion to their relevance? Is it about causing offence in general? About religion? About Islam

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specifically? “We came to the conclusion thatrepublishing would be both gratuitous and unnecessarily provocative, especially given what we knew about how offended Muslims … felt about the cartoons,” then-editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon wrote in 2006, explaining why the Globe didn’t run the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. But that was eight years ago.If you’re going to offer readers a window into your thinking, these are pretty basic questions to leave unanswered.

Of course, many have suggested the media are simply afraid of radical Islamists. I’m not so sure. I’m not remotely courageous, and I’mnot remotely worried that something might happen to me or my colleagues at the National Post because we ran some Charlie Hebdo covers to illustrate our news package. Our letters editor reports not having seen a single missive criticizing this ostensibly controversial decision.

I suspect it’s more a matter of Canadian politeness — a desire not to cause offence when it can be avoided; a preference not to make a fuss. And in this case it was very easy to avoid. That’s a problematic instinct for a news organization to have. Just as problematic, based on some of the

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explanations on offer, is that some outlets don’t actually seem to know why they didn’t publish the Charlie Hebdo covers. From no perspective is that encouraging.

National Post

Chris Selley: • cselley@nationalpost.com |

James Matkin • 9 minutes agoCanadian media are showing bias in not reportingthe full story of the killings at Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The cartoons are powerful political satire using humor to expose weakness, hypocrisyand evil with exaggerated drawings honed to the essence. The cartoon's images stick in our mindsin a way words never do. There is a hunger for this form of political criticism and free speech(3 million strong in France. Tedious text fails to bring to the fore in the same way as the cartoons that Mohammed's theology is a major problem with radical Islamic killing. Mocking Mohammed is viewed by large parts of moderate Sunni and Shia Muslims as a terrible sin deserving death. Sadly our Canadian media, unlike the US, by refusing to publish any Charlie satire give undeserved support to the

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antiquated blasphemy in the Canadian criminal code today. Canadian politicians could at least repeal these relics as a recent story in the National Post said. These laws prohibit the vilification of religion. The history is disheartening for freedom of thought and religion today. See Wikipedia summary:

"In the United States, for example, a prosecution for blasphemy would violate the Constitution according to the 1952 Supreme Courtcase Joseph Burstyn,Inc v. Wilson. The United Kingdom abolished its laws against blasphemy in England and Wales in 2008 with the passage of the Criminal Justiceand Immigration Act.[1] The last person hanged for blasphemy in Great Britainwas Thomas Aikenhead, aged 20, in Scotland in 1697. He was prosecuted for denying the veracity of the Old Testament and the legitimacy of Christ's miracles.[2]

Similarly, in practically all of the developed Western world and East Asian developed democracies like Japan and Taiwan, blasphemy laws, when existent, are largely de facto dead letter.

In Europe, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has recommended that countriesenact laws that protect the freedom of expression.

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As of 2014 in some jurisdictions the death penaltymay be applicable to blasphemy. Bangladesh forbids blasphemy by a provision in its penal code that prohibits "hurting religioussentiments", and by other laws and policies thatattack freedomof speech.[7] In April 2013, PrimeMinister Sheikh Hasina rejected calls for new laws from radical Islamist groups, notably Hefajat-e Islam, demanding death penalty for people involved in blasphemy. She described Bangladesh as a"secular democracy, where every religion had a right to be practicedfreely and fairly", and that "if anyone was found guilty ofhurtingthe sentiments of the followers of any religion or its venerable figures, therewas a law to deal with it".[8][9][10]" W.

Diane1976Some US states still have blasphemy laws hanging on the books as Canada apparently does. They likely haven't been used for a long time. But still, it's a good idea to get rid of them. (Some things the Constitution prevents Congress from doing are done by states.)The French wing of CBC and some Quebec papers, besides this one, NP, published CH cartoons.5:03 a.m., Thursday Jan. 15 | Other comments by Diane1976

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In wake of CharlieHebdo attacks, secularist groups to seek end of Canada’s blasphemy lawRepublish ReprintShanifa Nasser, National Post Staff | January 7, 2015 | Last Updated: Jan 8 10:21 AM ETMore from National Post Staff

http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/07/in-wake-of-charlie-hebdo-attacks-secularist-groups-to-seek-end-to-canadas-blasphemy-law/

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Marco Longari/AFP/Getty ImagesWhile some Western countries have abolished their blasphemy laws — or never had them in the first place — Canada has expanded its own to apply beyond just Christianity.The heads of two Canadian organizations promoting secularism will ask the Department of Justice to abolish a section of the criminal code that makes blasphemy illegal, following Wednesday’s attacks on Charlie Hebdo.

Section 296 of the Criminal Code makes “blasphemous libel” punishable by up to two years in jail in Canada.

No one been prosecuted under the law since 1935. As late as 1980, the law was used to charge the Canadian distributor of Monty

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Python’s film Life of Brian; the charges werelater dropped.

Only last month, the heads of Humanist Canadaand the Centre for Inquiry, a national organization that promotes “skeptical, secular rational and humanistic inquiry,” metwith Ambassador Andrew Bennett, head of the federal government’s Office of Religious Freedom, to note the law’s inconsistency withCanada’s policy of supporting religious freedom abroad.

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FileThe Canadian distributor of Monty Python’s film Life of Brian wascharged under On Mr. Bennett’s advice, said Eric Adriaans, national executive director of the Centre forInquiry, the two organizations will lobby theDepartment of Justice to remove the law. Mr. Bennett’s office did not respond to calls forcomment.

“These murders cause us so much grief but

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also further convince us that no remnants of these ancient attitudes can be allowed to continue,” Mr. Adriaans said.

The United Kingdom abolished its blasphemy law in 2008; the United States has never had one at the federal level. The French region of Alsace-Moselle does have one, dating back to its history as part of Germany, but it’s not easy to use. Last February, a group of French Muslims actually tried to sue Charlie Hebdo itself for blasphemy under the Alsace law, after it published a cover they’d found offensive. The suit failed because Alsace lawonly protects Catholicism and not Islam.

Meanwhile, Canada’s law has expanded in application beyond Christianity, to religion in general. The Canadian law was first used in 1892 and was originally intended to protect Christianity from blasphemy. Case lawsince then has broadened its application.

12 Dead in Attack on Paris Newspaper

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Derek From, a lawyer for the Calgary-based Canadian Constitution Foundation warns that while the law may be dormant, it is not dead.Britain’s blasphemy law, for example, was considered “dead” until it resurfaced in 1977when a pornographic magazine was charged withthe offence for publishing gay poetry about Jesus.

“It is an open question whether the Charter’sguarantee of freedom of expression will offerany protection,” Mr. From wrote in a 2013 letter to Calgary-area MP and Minister of State for Finance Kevin Sorenson. “This is a constitutional question that has never been tested.”

“The conservative right gets bents out of shape about hate speech provisions because

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they see it as an unconstitutional restriction of their freedom of expression. But that’s exactly what people who are [irreligious] would say about the blasphemy prohibitions — that they cannot say what theywant without freedom of prosecution,” Mr. From said.

“There are certain parts of the world where apostasy will get your head removed,” added Eric Thomas, President of Humanist Canada. “We don’t have that issue here but why would we even have this on our books?”

Hate speech no longer part of Canada’s Human Rights ActMichael Woods, Postmedia News | June 27, 2013 | Last Updated: Jun 27 10:07 PM ETMore from Postmedia News

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http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/27/hate-speech-no-longer-part-of-canadas-human-rights-act/

'Hate speech' no longer part of Canada's Human Rights ActHANDOUTBrian StorsethA contentious section of Canadian human rights law, long criticized by free-speech advocates as overly restrictive and tantamount to censorship, is gone for good.

A private member’s bill repealing Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the so-called “hate speech provision,” passed in theSenate this week. Its passage means the part of Canadian human rights law that permitted rights complaints to the federal Human RightsCommission for “the communication of hate messages by telephone or on the Internet” will soon be history.

The bill from Alberta Conservative MP Brian Storseth passed in the House of Commons last summer, but needed Senate approval. It has received royal assent and will take effect after a one-year phase-in period.

An “ecstatic” Storseth said the bill, which he says had wide support across ideological

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lines and diverse religious groups, repeals a“flawed piece of legislation” and he called Canada’s human rights tribunal “a quasi-judicial, secretive body that takes away yournatural rights as a Canadian.”

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It was a poorly-written piece oflegislation in the first place“(Section 13) had actually stopped being usedas a shield, as I think it was intended, to protect civil liberties, and started being used as a sword against Canadians, and it’s because it was a poorly-written piece of legislation in the first place,” he said.

Various human rights lawyers and groups such as the Canadian Bar Association say Section 13 is an important tool in helping to curb hate speech, and that removing it would lead to the proliferation of such speech on the Internet.

But critics of Section 13 said it enabled censorship on the Internet, and are calling its repeal a victory for free speech.

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“We’re pleased with the repeal,” said Cara Zwibel, director of the fundamental freedoms program at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), who testified before a Senate committee on the topic.

Zwibel said Section 13 had “some serious problems from a freedom of expression perspective.”

“We don’t want there to be a chill on speech that is controversial but not necessarily hateful,” she said. “We felt that given the impact that it has on freedom of expression, and given that it hasn’t really proven to be a very effective method for dealing with discrimination, that it shouldn’t be on the books anymore … We really encourage countering hateful speech, rather than tryingto censor it.”

Zwibel, at the CCLA, also said there’s not a lot of good evidence that marginalized groupshave used the statute to curb discrimination.

“Section 13 is not something that minority groups were already embracing and making use of,” she said, noting that a large majority of the tribunal cases “were brought by a single individual.”

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That person is Ottawa-based human rights lawyer Richard Warman, who has brought 16 successful Section 13 complaints before the human rights tribunal against neo-Nazis and white supremacists since 2001.

Virtually every other Western democracy has these kinds of civil law controls on hate speechOn Thursday, Warman said Section 13 had helped sideline neo-Nazis from the Internet because of its power to obtain cease-and-desist orders from Canada’s human rights tribunal and enforce them through the courts.

“Virtually every other Western democracy has these kinds of civil law controls on hate speech,” Warman said. “Now, Canada just movesone large step further out of line from realizing that these kinds of controls are necessary and imperative.”

Producing and disseminating hate speech remains a crime in Canada, but regulating it will fall to the courts, not to human rights tribunals. Under the Criminal Code, spreadinghate against identifiable groups can carry upto a two-year prison sentence.

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But Liberal Sen. Nancy Ruth noted that while any citizen can file a human rights complaint, criminal charges for hate speech require the attorney general’s approval.

She said she left the Senate “heartbroken” after the bill passed, saying it creates a gap regarding discrimination based on sex, age and disabled people.

“This is a victory for hate speech. To removeprotection from disadvantaged groups in society … this is a protection for hate speech,” she said, accusing the Conservative senators who voted for the bill of “tribal loyalty.”

“It is not about freedom of expression. It’s about freedom to hate, in my opinion.”

Warman also said institutional barriers make it “virtually impossible” to convince police to lay criminal charges for hate speech on the Internet.

However, Storseth said the government has committed to “buffing up the Criminal Code toensure that these types of groups would not be left open to hate speech.”

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A. Alan Borovoy: Still no clarity over what constitutes ‘hate speech’ in Canada

A.Alan Borovoy, National Post | December 15, 2014 | Last Updated: Dec 15 7:30 AM ETMore from National Post

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/12/15/a-alan-borovoy-still-no-clarity-over-what-constitutes-hate-speech-in-canada/

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Twenty-four years ago, on Dec. 13, 1990, the Supreme Court of Canada turned back a constitutional challenge of the “hate speech”prohibitions in the Criminal Code and those in the federal Human Rights Act. In the case of the Criminal Code, this meant speech that “willfully promotes hatred” and, in the case of the Human Rights Act, this meant speech that is “likely to expose” its targets to “hatred or contempt,” on grounds such as raceand sexual orientation. Human rights legislation in British Columbia, Alberta and

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Saskatchewan essentially replicates what was in the federal act.

Although they acknowledged elements of vagueness and subjectivity in the key word “hatred,” the justices insisted that the human rights law referred only to the most extreme emotions of “detestation, calumny andvilification.” As long as subsequent adjudicators paid heed to this factor, the Supreme Court contended that their judgments would not be likely to go off the rails.

Experience since that time makes these admonitions look almost naive. Consider, for example, the Saskatchewan case involving anti-gay bumper stickers showing a diagonal line drawn through two men holding hands. In addition, the bumper sticker contained references to biblical quotations warning that men who lie together are deserving of death. Both the Human Rights Tribunal and Court of Queen’s Bench held that this material fell within the extreme bounds of the Supreme Court’s test. But the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal declared that the impugned bumper stickers did not satisfy the Supreme Court’s requirements.

In another Saskatchewan case, the issue

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concerned some flyers disseminated by an anti-gay activist.  Among other things, the flyers charged that homosexuals wanted to “share their filth” with Saskatchewan school children. The flyers also alleged that gay men were three times more likely than straight men to abuse children. Both the Human Rights Tribunal and Court of Queen’s Bench held that the flyers contained the kindof extreme language prohibited by the SupremeCourt. The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal, however, reversed this judgment, holding thatthe material failed to meet the Supreme Court’s test. Incredibly, the Supreme Court of Canada overruled the appeal court and reinstated the original finding.

Lest these inconsistencies create the appearance of an exclusively Saskatchewan phenomenon, there was also an Alberta case involving an anti-gay letter to a daily newspaper that was written by a local cleric.His letter had declared that, “where homosexuality flourishes all manner of wickedness abounds.” The Human Rights Tribunal held that this material met the Supreme Court’s test, but the Court of Queen’s Bench and Court of Appeal held otherwise.

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Since the chosen adjudicators were all over the map, the Supreme Court comes off looking somewhat devoid of insight. For all the “clarity” contained in its judgment, the Supreme Court might as well have said simply that “hatred means hatred.” Indeed, I once labelled this a “tautology in disguise.”

To the extent that both statuteshave purported to suppress expressions of “hatred,” they are effectively identicalThe consequent chaos appears to have induced Parliament to remove these hate speech prohibitions from the Human Rights Act. Unfortunately, similar language is still on the books in Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Even more disquieting is the fact that a number of politicians and commentators have boasted that the hate speech provisions in the Criminal Code have survived.  Canadians were to be consoled withthe knowledge that hate mongers could still be prosecuted.

Under the Criminal Code, the Supreme Court defined “hatred” as involving “emotions of anintense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and

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detestation.” How is this different from the court’s definition of “hatred” in the Human Rights Act — “strong and deep felt emotions of detestation, calumny and vilification”? Winston Churchill said it best, it’s “a distinction without a difference.”

Granted, the Criminal Code requires the existence of intent and the Human Rights Act did not. But, to the extent that both statutes have purported to suppress expressions of “hatred,” they are effectivelyidentical. It becomes clear, therefore, that all the adjudicating, legislating and lawyering around these issues of free speech and hate speech have simply exacerbated the confusion that was there all along.

National Post

A. Alan Borovoy is general counsel emeritus at the Canadian Civil Liberties Asso

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