Tribunal: the CHRC has been breaking the law for years

Two years ago, Athanasios Hadjis was a human rights hack, sitting on the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal full of other hacks. He mindlessly rubber-stamped the censorship litigation oozing from the Canadian Human Rights Commission and its complainant of fortune, Stormfront member Richard Warman.

Here’s a section 13 censorship case, less than two years ago, where Hadjis happily condemned a young woman to a lifetime publication ban, ordered her to pay Warman $3,000 for his hurt feelings (tax free to him), and then fined her another $1,500. That’s a heavy punishment for a woman earning just above minimum wage, and too poor to hire a lawyer.

(It’s been a while since I practiced any criminal law. I’d be curious to know what kind of criminal conviction these days would yield a $4,500 fine and no time in custody. Would a first offence for an assault with a weapon get that heavy a penalty? If you’re a criminal lawyer who knows, tell me in the comments section.)

Hadjis didn’t mind his lifestyle one bit. He was part of the human rights industry – near the top of the food chain, actually – and it was easy work. No-one really cared about the people he sentenced for thought crimes. 90% of such victims were too poor to have lawyers there, and only murderers and rapists get legal aid – not people who write rude things on the Internet. The news media sure didn’t give a damn about the petty racists Hadjis bravely brought to, uh, justice.

What a difference a couple of years makes.

Today, Athanasios Hadjis issued a 40,000-word ruling – that’s almost as long as my book, Shakedown! – denouncing the Canadian Human Rights Commission, its aggressive style and its punitive powers. He rejected almost all of their “evidence” that Marc Lemire published “hate”, pointing out the curious fact that their five-year prosecution of him involved nothing that Lemire himself wrote, and nothing that was actually on Lemire’s website at the time the complaint was filed.

Hadjis called some of the comments that others wrote on Lemire’s website “offensive”, some of them “xenophobic” and some of them merely “pessimistic”. In other words, almost all were political views, not hate speech. What more proof is needed that the CHRC is a political vengeance machine, with Jennifer Lynch and Richard Warman deciding who is allowed to speak and who isn't?

I laughed out loud when I read that one of the things that the Canadian Human Rights Commission spent millions of dollars prosecuting was the comment that French Canadians were “cheese sniffers”. I’m not even kidding, the CHRC thinks that it should be against the law to call someone a cheese sniffer. Gentle reader, I swear I am not making that up – read the ruling yourself; just search for the word cheese. Or sniffer.

So two years after being a censor himself, Hadjis now calls censorship un-Canadian, un-constitutional and illegal. He says he will have nothing more to do with it, and he will refuse to implement it.

Wow.

Hadjis isn’t the first tribunal member to put down the Kool Aid and slowly walk away from the human rights cult. This March, Hadjis’s colleague, Edward Lustig, issued an equally stunning ruling, when he refused to punish the target of Warman’s last inquisition, and instead condemned Warman and his tactics as “disturbing” and “disappointing”.

Lustig was appointed by Stephen Harper. But Hadjis was appointed by Jean Chretien. And before Hadjis was a censor, he was the head of Montreal’s Greek lobby – a master practitioner of multicultural ethno-politics. His conversion from fascism to freedom has been a long journey indeed.

First Richard Moon, the professor who was paid $52,000 to whitewash the CHRC’s censorship, turned against them. Then Lustig. Now Hadjis. Pretty soon the last dozen supporters of censorship will be Jennifer Lynch, Richard Warman, and ten of Richard Warman’s anti-Semitic personas on the Internet.

Last December I wrote that Lynch was a “jet-setting lawbreaker”. It was not an exercise in hyperbole, but rather a legal analysis of her corrupt behavior: it was contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights, and contrary to the express ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada when they last considered censorship laws in 1990.

Lynch was a scofflaw, but she didn’t give a damn, because nobody was going to stop her.

As I wrote in December: More