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James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland, has a piece in Friday's Australian on the "human rights" commissions business. It doesn't seem to be online, so here are a few choice excerpts:
HERE is a little known fact about Canada. It is today a country where you can say or write things that are true and yet still be brought before a tribunal.
That tribunal can fine you; it can order you to pay money to the people who complained about your words; it can force you to issue an apology; it can do all three.
That's not all, though. The people who complained will not need to hire a lawyer.
Their costs will be picked up by the state, by the taxpayers.
You, on the other hand, will have to hire a lawyer to defend yourself. And there will be no award of costs at the end, so that even if you win, you will still be out of pocket to your lawyers tens of thousands of dollars.
Of course, you will not win...
These things are happening right now -- in Britain's oldest self-governing Dominion, the place where so many of the lawyerly class here in Australia regularly look for inspiration when it comes to bills of rights and how best to protect human rights (which is incredibly ironic, I know)... I don't much like having to state the obvious, which is that Canada has become a joke as far as the issue of protecting free speech is concerned.
And not such a good joke when the laugh's on you:
In the Steyn case, what the Canadian Islamic Congress is objecting to are quotations Steyn used. They are quotes of what Muslim leaders have said. So the purported grievance is that a writer is quoting one of their fellow religionists, and that quote (though true) might in the minds of those ideologues staffing these tribunals expose someone to hatred, even though in fact there is not a scrap of evidence that this has actually happened.
And a few years back when these hate-speech provisions were challenged, what did the Supreme Court of Canada say? ``They're perfectly fine, thank you very much'', said the court. And the Canadian Attorney-General? His department has just published the most fatuous defence of the provision, and this from a Conservative Government.
It notes that history is full of examples of times when lies and distortions have been used by groups such as the Nazis to repress speech, missing the irony that they want to repress speech now so that others can't do so later.
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