A library's policies on user behavior and workplace safety and conduct should address hateful conduct as a violation of those policies. Libraries should be prepared to prosecute, or support prosecution, of all bias-motivated criminal acts and provide aid and support to victims of such crimes and those targeted by hateful conduct. Reports of hateful speech and hate crimes in libraries is escalating in a time when reported hate crimes are at an all time high.
In responding to hate speech and hateful conduct, public libraries should be aware that they operate under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and the associated court opinions governing access to the library as a designated public forum. There is an established body of case law holding that public libraries are a type of public forum, and that every person using a public library has a First Amendment right to access, use and take advantage of all the services the public library has to offer, without regard to the person's background, identity or economic status or their beliefs, opinions, or views.
Thus, under law, public libraries cannot discriminate against a library user or deny the user access to library resources and services based upon their views or beliefs. This principle applies to the provision of access to books, media, programming and the internet as well as publicly available meeting room space.
Knowing that the presence and activities of some groups in public libraries, while constitutionally protected, can cause fear and discomfort in some library users and staff, there are some strategies public libraries can employ to embrace their role as welcoming, inclusive, and responsible spaces that go beyond the adoption and enforcement of user behavior policies.
One strategy is to forgo the provision of public meeting room spaces for all users, allowing the library to fully control the messaging that takes place in its building and spaces. A second strategy is to employ the library's right under the First Amendment to speak in its own voice as a government agency about matters of importance.
Norwood had been convicted of an offence under Section 5 of the Public Order Act discussed below as aggravated by Section 31 of the Crime and Disorder Act , which together criminalise displaying, with hostility towards a racial or religious group, any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting, within the sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress by it.
He appealed his conviction to the High Court, which dismissed his appeal. Such a general, vehement attack against a religious group, linking the group as a whole with a grave act of terrorism, is incompatible with the values proclaimed and guaranteed by the Convention, notably tolerance, social peace and non-discrimination.
It means that courts in England and Wales will generally adopt the approach taken by the European Court of Human Rights unless there is a good reason not to. In all three cases, a magistrate can grant the police a warrant to enter and search premises to locate any material that incites hatred on racial, religious or sexual orientation grounds.
The offence of stirring up racial hatred, located in Section 18 of the Public Order Act , is set out below:. The offence of incitement to racial hatred was originally enacted in the Race Relations Act before migrating to the Public Order Act It was joined by the new offences of incitement to religious hatred in , and incitement to hatred on sexual orientation grounds in The passage of the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill in , which introduced the new offence of inciting religious hatred, was particularly controversial.
The offence was introduced largely to offer greater protection to Muslims in the wake of reprisals after the September attacks in However, broadcasters, authors and a range of other secular and non-secular groups expressed concerns the offence would limit their free speech rights. English PEN and a number of free expression groups lobbied for further amendments to protect free speech from inappropriate use of the act. The following acts are therefore crimes, if and only if by doing them, the perpetrator intends to stir up racial hatred, or, given all the circumstances, the act is likely to stir up racial hatred:.
Remember that to be a criminal offence, the perpetrator must have acted with intent to stir up racial hatred, or it must have been likely that their action s would have caused racial hatred to be stirred up. For the offence of using words or behaviour that are threatening, abusive, or insulting, the alleged offender has a defence if:. He operated a Facebook account under an alias, onto which he posted virulently racist updates, comments, and links, aimed primarily at Afro-Caribbean and Jewish communities.
He was charged with stirring up racial hatred by publishing written material, contrary to Section 19 1 of the Public Order Act count 1. In May , Burns made a speech during a demonstration staged outside the United States embassy in London. The speech was filmed and posted on YouTube. For this, Burns was charged with stirring up racial hatred through words or behaviour, contrary to Section 18 1 of the Public Order Act count 2.
The jury found him guilty on both counts. Please see the Public Order guide for more guidance on what these words mean. A person who has in their possession written material or a recording of sounds or visual media which is threatening, abusive or insulting commits an offence if they intend to distribute, publish, show, or display the material, and they intend to stir up racial hatred or such stirring up is likely in so doing.
It is a defence to this crime if the accused is not aware they have the material in their possession and had no reason to suspect it was threatening, abusive, or insulting. If a police officer has reasonable grounds for believing racially inflammatory material will be found at certain premises, a magistrate can issue a warrant for the search those premises.
It is an offence under Section 29B of the Public Order Act for an individual to use threatening words or behaviour, or display any written material which is threatening, that is intended to stir up hatred on the grounds of religion or sexual orientation.
It is important to note that the offences related to hatred of religious groups or sexual orientation are more narrowly defined than racial hatred offences in two specific ways. No offence is committed by using words, images or behaviours that are merely insulting or abusive.
Secondly, a person must intend to stir up religious hatred or hatred on sexual orientation grounds. The fact that only threatening conduct that is intended to stir up hatred on the grounds of religion or sexual orientation is criminalised means that a narrower range of conduct is prohibited on these grounds, and, conversely, a broader range of conduct is prohibited in the context of race. The data is presented annually, allowing for a public monitoring of trends in hate crimes across Canadian metropolitan areas.
They include violent crimes motivated by hate, such as common assault, aggravated assault, assault with a weapon or causing bodily harm, and uttering threats.
Another offence tracked by Statistics Canada is set out in section 4. More generally, the offence of mischief is the act of wilfully destroying, damaging, rendering dangerous, useless, inoperative or ineffective, or obstructing the lawful use or enjoyment of property.
Different forms of hate speech are prohibited in a number of federal enactments. For instance, section 8 of the Broadcasting Distribution Regulations prohibits the broadcasting of. Similar provisions are contained in other regulations made under the Broadcasting Act. Human rights laws, with their broad goal of eliminating discrimination against identifiable groups, can serve to address expressions of hatred and contempt and any expression that displays an intention to discriminate or to incite others to discriminate.
Whether these laws should include prohibitions on hate speech and hate propaganda has been a matter of debate for some time, and Canadian jurisdictions have responded with different approaches in their laws. Each statute prohibits discrimination on specified grounds, such as race, sex, age or religion, and in the context of employment, accommodation and publicly available services.
Every legislature in Canada has passed a human rights law to prohibit or limit discriminatory activities. The original purpose of these provisions was to prohibit the types of signs that had been used in Canada by some stores and businesses indicating that the members of certain racial or ethnic groups would not be served.
While these provisions place limits on freedom of expression, they have received little attention by commentators or in Canadian courts. Human rights legislation in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories contains some form of prohibition against the promotion of hatred or contempt. Courts have emphasized that such references to freedom of expression in the Alberta and Saskatchewan human rights laws require that a balancing act be performed between the objective of eradicating discrimination and the need to protect free expression.
The debates concerning whether to retain, reform or repeal section 13 revealed the challenges inherent in striking a balance between free speech and the protection of vulnerable groups.
Former section 13 of the CHRA did not specifically prohibit hate messages; rather, it made it a discriminatory practice to. Former section 13 served as an alternative but complementary approach for dealing with hate promotion to that provided for by the Criminal Code , which, in providing a criminal sanction, was intended to be used in response to more egregious hate promotion. They differed in several key ways. In addition, the Code provisions, unlike section 13, do not restrict the specific types of communications to which they apply; include the requirement that the Attorney General consent to the prosecution of a complaint anyone could bring a complaint under former section 13 of the CHRA ; contain defences for the respondent to a complaint; and require that a complainant show evidence of specific intent or wilfulness on the part of the respondent.
The Supreme Court of Canada and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal CHRT have held that although these laws infringe the right to free expression granted in section 2 b of the Charter, they are reasonable and justifiable limits on this right.
The key court decision regarding the hate propaganda provisions of the Criminal Code is R. A slim majority of four of the seven sitting judges of the Supreme Court confirmed in that section 2 is constitutional. This case involved John Ross Taylor and the Western Guard Party, which at the time were operating a hate promotion telephone message service.
Although section 13 was found to be inconsistent with section 2 b of the Charter, the same judges who formed the majority in the Keegstra case held that it was saved under section 1 as a reasonable limit in a free and democratic society. In his decision for the majority, former Chief Justice Dickson concluded again that hate propaganda presents a serious threat to society and that it undermines.
Parliament subsequently amended section 13 to add that it applied to Internet communications. One other decision worth noting is that of the Federal Court of Appeal in Lemire v. Canada Human Rights Commission in In , in Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission v. The Court followed its previous decision in Taylor and upheld the prohibition against hatred as a reasonable limit on free expression.
The Court reviewed the law concerning hate speech and the test that should be applied by courts and tribunals in such cases. Among its reasons, the Court concluded that expression of this type is not sufficiently egregious to justifiably limit freedom of expression. While the Supreme Court has supported the constitutionality of both the criminal and human rights legislative models, some legislatures have moved away from using the human rights model to address hate speech.
Proponents of taking a less restrictive approach to free expression have tended to view the human rights law model for dealing with hate promotion as an unnecessary and excessive restriction on individual rights, while others have considered it to be a more efficient and flexible means of stopping the spread of hatred.
In the period leading up to the repeal of section 13 of the CHRA , many commentators who remained generally supportive of some role for human rights complaints in dealing with the spread of hatred concurred that some reform was necessary.
To address the various concerns being raised, the CHRC published two reports in and , both of which proposed a number of reforms. The first report was commissioned from Richard Moon, a university professor whose research has focused on freedom of expression. He recommended the repeal of section 13 and greater use by police and prosecutors of section The legal line between hate speech and free speech in Lubbock is an important distinction to acknowledge.
If you want to know more about the line between hate speech and free speech, and want to know more about your rights, get in touch with a knowledgeable Lubbock attorney.
After the brutal murder of James Byrd, Jr. However, the Act refers only to actual crimes such as murder and violence. It does not say anything about simply making a verbal remark or comment to another person.
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