Criticism
Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, has also criticized Section 13(1). He cited an example of the book Hitler's Willing Executioners, which alleges the complicity of German civilians in the Holocaust, and said that the thesis is arguably "likely to expose" German people to contempt, and therefore be a violation of Section 13(1).
Borovoy also noted that under Section 13(1), "Intent is not a requirement, and truth and reasonable belief in the truth is no defence." He has said that when he and other human rights activists advocated the creation of human rights commissions they "never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech" and that censorship was not the role he had envisioned for the commissions.
Borovoy further added that:
"Although it's true that they have nailed some genuine hatemongers with it, it has nevertheless been used or threatened to be used against a wide variety of constituencies who don't bear the slightest resemblance to the kind of hatemongers that were originally envisioned: anti-American protesters, French-Canadian nationalists, a film sympathetic to South Africa's Nelson Mandela, a pro-Zionist book, a Jewish community leader, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, and even a couple years ago, a pro-Israeli speaker was briefed about the anti-hate law by a police detective before he went in to make a speech."
Borovoy commented that none of these cases resulted in a lasting conviction or property seizure "But only lawyers could be consoled by that."
Linguist and analytic philosopher Noam Chomsky has said about the section, "I think it's outrageous, like the comparable European laws. It's also pure hypocrisy. If it were applied the media and journals would be shut down. They don't expose current enemies of the state to hatred or contempt?"
White supremacists James Scott Richardson and Alex Kulbashian, who ran a racist website called "Canadian Ethnic Cleansing Team," are currently challenging the constitutionality of section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act. Other white supremacists such as Marc Lemire and Paul Fromm have also criticised the constitutionality of the CHRC. Lemire (with the qualified support of PEN Canada and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, among others) has won the right to cross-examine HRC investigators concerning their conduct during investigations, namely their posting of provocative racist comments on websites. Jonathan Kay, of the National Post, opined that the HRC had "managed a seemingly impossible task: They've found a way to rehabilitate the image of neo-Nazis, transforming them from odious dirtbags into principled free-speech martyrs."
Mary Agnes Welch, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists stated that Human rights commissions "were never meant to act as language nannies. The current system allows complainants to chill the speech of those they disagree with by entangling targets in a human rights bureaucracy that doesn't have to operate under the same strict rules of defence as a court." Syed Soharwardy, the founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada who filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission against Ezra Levant for republication of Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad, later dropped the complaint and changed his mind about the value of using Canada's human rights commissions to prosecute 'hate speech'. Fred Henry, Catholic Bishop of Alberta, has argued that the HRCs are used to stifle debate on important issues.
In a press conference on October 2, 2008, Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, stated that the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) has been "infiltrated by Islamists" and that some of its commissioners are closely linked to the Canadian Islamic Congress and the Canadian Arab Federation, both of which, according to Fatah, have "contempt for Canadian values."
Read more about this topic: Canadian Human Rights Commission Free Speech Controversy
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)