Commission out of its depth online
COLIN FREEZE
November 25, 2008
The Canadian Human Rights Commission should get out of the business of trying to censor hate speech, says a much-anticipated report released yesterday.
Freedom of expression trumps overbroad minority-rights laws, argues its author, University of Windsor law professor Richard Moon.
In the Internet age, he writes, "any attempt to exclude all racial or other prejudice from the public discourse would require extraordinary intervention by the state."
"Because discriminatory attitudes and assumptions are so pervasive, it is vital that they be confronted, rather than censored."
Read on...
Here is the report this article is referring to. Tom
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1 comment:
I really don't understand why these hate speech laws need to exist at all. They are extremely dangerous by nature, and the way they have been implemented by provincial human rights commissions in Canada is somewaht disturbing.
As I understand it, complainants can essentialy demand that the provincial HR commissions pay the legal costs of their claims against defendants, who are forced to cover their own costs even if they win. This happened in the case of the complaint against Mark Steyn.
This looks uncomfortably like censorship, or at best government-sponsored harassment under a judicial guise.
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