Human rights tribunal scores victory over neo-Nazi

**European blood** · 11-19-2011, 04:50 PM

What's legal or illegal to be said or written (perhaps merely thought one day) depends on the people who hold power: politicians, judges, government prosecutors/persecutors, pseudo government spooks, snitches, etc.

One day promoting multiculturalism may become illegal and punishable.

A neo-Nazi leader and former university math lecturer has lost a court appeal that bolsters the power of the embattled Canadian Human Rights Commission to enforce its orders against those spreading hate.

Regina’s Terry Tremaine, head of the National-Socialist Party of Canada, which uses the Nazi swastika and images of Adolf Hitler to promote itself, was originally cleared of a contempt of court ruling on a technicality.

Even though he “deliberately flaunted” an order of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to stop his online hate messages, imposed in 2007, he won an appeal last year at the Federal Court of Canada, which said the tribunal, as a “quasi-judicial” body, could issue orders but not enforce them.

It was a point not lost on Mr. Tremaine, who declined to remove his Internet postings, made under the moniker “mathdoktor99,” which called Jews a “parasitic race,” said “blacks are intellectually inferior to whites” and “Hitler was a lot nicer to the Jews than they deserved,” according to the tribunal’s judgment.

Rather, he told court, the tribunal deserved his contempt.

Mr. Tremaine said he felt compelled to ignore the order.

“My purpose in ignoring the cease and desist order was to address the urgent matter of impending white extinction,” he said.

But the Federal Court of Appeal last week breathed new life into the ability of quasi-judicial tribunals — not only those dealing with human rights — to issue orders that must be complied with.

Anti-hate speech activist Richard Warman, an Ottawa lawyer who launched the human rights complaint, praised the appeal victory.

“This says that tribunal orders, generally, are deserving of much greater respect and much greater weight than they seem to have been in the past,” he said.

“It gives weight to the Human Rights Tribunal’s orders and says these are not orders to be ignored. These are orders of a quasi-judicial body that Parliament has given authority to issue and they shall be respected. I think that’s really important, because without that power behind it then tribunals are really rendering their orders into voids.”

After the original hearing, the tribunal ordered Mr. Tremaine to stop posting discriminatory messages and fined him $4,000. He ignored it.

In a burdensome process, the commission, which prosecutes cases at the tribunal, registers tribunal orders in Federal Court to give them the weight of court authority. Although that process continues, the ruling means contempt complaints are valid from the moment a breach occurs, not just from when a court adopts the order.

Mr. Tremaine must now return to the Federal Court for sentencing on his contempt finding. The maximum penalty is five years in prison and a fine of any amount.

He did not respond to a request for comment Friday. Neither did his Vancouver lawyer, Douglas Christie.

Mr. Warman said he will make submissions at sentencing for a prison term for Mr. Tremaine because of his blatant, unrepentant and apparently continuing contempt.

As of Friday evening, the National-Socialist Party of Canada website still was publishing the same or similar material and the other online posts were still accessible.

Mr. Warman’s complaints also led to Mr. Tremaine’s departure from his post as a lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan, where he taught a first-year math course.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/06/106466/

Hate speech law on the chopping block

OTTAWA - Canada's human rights commissions could soon be de-fanged.

New legislation would repeal Section 13, the hate speech portion of Human Rights Act.

“Our government believes Section 13 is not an appropriate or effective means for combating hate propaganda. We believe the Criminal Code is the best vehicle to prosecute these crimes,” Justice Minister Rob Nicholson told the House of Commons during question period.

“I say to the opposition: get onside with the media, MacLean's magazine, National Post, and even the Toronto Star says this section should go.”

Quebecor and its media properties, including Sun News Network and QMI Agency, also want the section scrapped.

Tory backbencher Brian Storseth drafted the private member's bill, C-304.

“This is a great first step,” Storseth told The Source host Ezra Levant on Sun News Network. “Free speech is something we all hold very dear to our hearts and something we all have a necessity for.”

Levant, a lawyer, put the boots to the Alberta Human Rights Commission after they accused him of spreading hate speech in 2006 for reprinting a cartoon of Mohammed wearing a turban bomb in his Western Standard magazine.

The same Danish cartoon had sparked Islamist riots that killed more than 200 people in one month. The artist lives under constant threat.

“The entire Canadian Human Rights Act ought to be repealed. It's worse than just useless,” said Levant. “You don't even have to cause hurt feelings — just to have published something likely to cause hurt feelings. What an insane law, so un-Canadian, so contrary to our traditions of liberty that go back centuries, inherited from the United Kingdom,.”

With a Conservative majority in the House and the Senate, the bill will likely become law quickly, after 32 years accusations and convictions over allegations of hate speech.

“No more witch hunts by the Canadian Human Rights Commission, no more persecuting their political enemies, said Levant.

http://www.lfpress.com/news/canada/2.../18983681.html