I sympathize deeply with human-rights lawyer Richard Warman, who has asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to block access to two U.S.-based neo-Nazi hate websites.
But I worry about what he wants the CRTC to do.
The websites, operated by a “notorious” Nazi sympathizer based in Virginia, call for “violent overthrow” of the Canadian government and the “extermination” of Jews in Canada. One even went so far as to encouraged people to “take violent action” against Warman and even posted his home address on the sites.
Warman, naturally, now fears for his life.
The sites are beyond the reach of Canadian law. The CRTC has the power, rarely used, to order Internet providers to temporarily block them from Canadian web surfers. But the CRTC must first issue an order allowing Internet carriers to do so voluntarily.
While no one will weep bitter tears over the loss of the websites, asking the federal government to protect us from them is an extraordinary step, one that would make a terrible precedent.
While I am appalled by neo-Nazi anti-Semitism, asking the CRTC to block them shouldn’t be a first recourse. There are many, better ways of dealing with them, including charging them under their own hate-crime legislation. Most of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and 48 U.S. states have adopted some kind of anti-hate laws. Or to prosecute the neo-Nazis for counselling to commit murder or inciting violence.
I asked Howard Knopf, an Ottawa copyright lawyer, what he thought of the move, and he said, in his lawyerly way, that such a move by the CRTC would be “an unwarranted and unwise assertion of extraterritoriality.”
Knopf sees any action by the CRTC as a slippery slope: if we start blocking websites we don’t like, “we could end up like China.” Better, he says, to use existing laws than create new ones that might have unintended consequences, ones that we will not be able to see while we are in the throes moral indignation. "Hard cases," he says, "make bad law."
“Wouldn’t it be against the law in the U.S. to call for the assassination of a particular Canadian?” he asks.
It certainly would. And it would be far more appropriate for the Americans to prosecute one of their own. It's their responsibility.
