Hate laws hard to enforce without rules to register web sites: Wiesenthal Center

Canada’s lawful access laws aren’t sufficient to back up this country’s prohibitions on hate material posted to the Internet, says an international watchdog group. On October 31, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s director of national affairs in Canada, Leo Adler, presented a new compilation of global hate sites while calling on Ottawa to give the police the tools to track down Canadians who post illegal material on domestic servers. In an address to Ottawa media, Adler said that this country’s hate laws, which prohibit the dissemination of racist and other hate material, are adequate to prosecute offenders. But, he said, finding out who those people are to effectively prevent them from further postings is difficult given the often anonymous nature of registering web sites. He noted that Canadians often use American post office boxes, or even falsified and taunting names and addresses to register their Canadian sites, making it difficult to bring the offenders before the courts. "We believe that there should be a form of registration where you’d have a valid registration system so that if, in fact, someone is at some point involved in criminal activities, you’d go through the same process that you’d go through for ordinary wire-taps and other search warrants where a judge has to approve it," Adler said. Canada’s hate laws have been successfully used in the past to deal with racist content. In January this year, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal found that Ernst Zundel’s Holocaust-denial site contravened the Canadian Human Rights Act. In rendering its decision, tribunal chief commissioner Michelle Falardeau-Ramsay noted: "The tribunal has confirmed that this Internet activity is against the law and Canadians will not tolerate it. As a tool of mass communication, the Internet has a tremendous impact on our daily lives. We now know that the Internet is not a ‘lawless zone’ and cannot be used to promote hate. This is all the more important in light of the tensions that have emerged since last September’s terrorist activity." Adler said the point is well taken, but that in Zundel’s case, "(he) didn’t mind proclaiming who he was, so we knew who he was. There are other sites which we’ve traced to mailboxes in Buffalo. "If you don’t know who’s behind a site, then in that sense you can’t prosecute. (Hate laws are) good at defining what is hate, and the process for going after the hate-mongers, but it doesn’t tell us who to go after." Adler said, however, that the centre isn’t trampling on Canadian rights. "We are not in favour of censorship. We don’t believe in it. What we do believe, however, is that the Internet should have a form of regulation in much the same way that television and radio and broadcasters are regulated." More than a system for registering web sites with traceable identities, however, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is also seeking greater international cooperation on the issue. American sites, he noted, are under the protection of strong First Amendment rights. Many hate sites, he said, are located in the U.S. but target Canadians, going so far as to serve users in both official languages. The Council of Europe, on November 8, signed an additional protocol to its Convention on Cybercrime to ban racism and xenophobia on the Internet. The U.S. and Canada are both signatories to the convention. The anti-racism protocol was left out of the main body of the convention due to U.S. concerns over freedom of speech. The Wiesenthal Center has made its comments to Canada’s lawful access process, which is currently being undertaken by the Department of Justice, Industry Canada, and the Department of the Solicitor General of Canada. The departments are seeking ways to open up Internet communications to law enforcement agencies (CNM, Sep. 6/02). The deadline to submit comments in that consultation process has recently been extended to December 16.

Hate laws hard to enforce without rules to register web sites: Wiesenthal Center

News | 11/14/2002 5:00 am EST

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