http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/Story.html?id=399125
Jeers
and loathing at tribunal
Critics in gallery challenge human
rights bureacracy
Joseph Brean,
National Post Published: Wednesday, March 26, 2008
OTTAWA - For people who consider the Canadian
Human Rights Tribunal a kangaroo court, the supporters of Marc Lemire in his defence against a
hate-speech charge were surprisingly respectful of protocol yesterday, as they
packed a gallery to see the landmark cross-examination of the investigator
behind the case.
Mindful of the police presence, everyone rose
when directed and no one heckled, although old men muttered their dissent. A
thick-necked young Lemire associate with a buzz-cut
kept cracking his neck and gnawing the chapped skin on his thumb, but was
otherwise quiet and still as he doodled and took notes. Even the old guy with
the knife in his pocket smiled as he removed it for the Tribunal guards at the
hearing room door.
All in all, the monitor from the Canadian
Jewish Congress had plenty to monitor, from Canada's most famous online racists
and the legal team that defended Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel,
down to the conservative Maclean's columnist Mark Steyn,
dapper with a red pocket puff, who at the breaks signed autographs for
admirers.
It seemed a recipe for disaster, but the
awkward highlight of the day came not from Mr. Lemire's
defence team, nor the prosecution team of the
Canadian Human Rights Commission, nor even the complainant, Richard Warman, a human rights activist who has rarely attended his
own case, and did not yesterday as it concluded.
Rather, it came when the Tribunal appeared to wrongly out an innocent person as a Commission operative,
thus exposing her to the unwanted attention of the vast army of bloggers who
support Mr. Lemire, owner of the far-right FreedomSite.
For a government agency that has fought for
months to protect the personal security of their own staff, even going so far
as to (unsuccessfully) invoke national security to keep them off the witness
stand, their handling of the "Nellie Hechme"
question is remarkable.
Legally, however, the most significant part of
the day was the admission by CHRC investigator Dean Steacy
that his colleagues share control of an online identity called Jadewarr, which they have used to anonymously monitor and
contribute to controversial far-right and white supremacist websites. Mr. Steacy's examination on this point by Mr. Lemire's lawyer Barbara Kulaszka
bolstered their case that he should not be held accountable for what others
post on his site, especially if those others might be government employees.
There was little mention of Mr. Lemire's constitutional challenge of the part of the human
rights act under which he is charged, section 13.1,
which says it is a violation to disseminate material on the Internet that is
"likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt."
That challenge explains Mr. Steyn's presence, because Maclean's is also accused of a
section 13.1 violation, based largely on a Steyn book
excerpt about Muslim demographics, which was brought by Mohamed Elmasry, the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, and
others.
Ezra Levant, the other high-profile section
13.1 defendant (he published the Danish Muhammad cartoons in his now-defunct
Western Standard magazine) did not attend, but he had the luxury of reading
live Internet coverage of the hearing by Mr. Steyn's
colleague Kady O'Malley, and Mr. Lemire
himself, who blogged from his chair closest to the witness stand.
There were moments of drama, such as when Mr. Steacy bluntly and repeatedly refused to answer a question
(he was asked for the identity of an anonymous complainant, who never filed a
formal complaint), to the evident disbelief of Athanasios
Hadjis, the one-man tribunal hearing the case.
"You refuse to answer?" he said
twice.
There were raised voices, most notably that of
Doug Christie--best known as Ernst Zundel's lawyer
and now an intervenor on behalf of Mr. Lemire -- who yelled at Mr. Hadjis
that he had flown all the way from Victoria, B.C., on his own tab, and he was
not going to let the Commission lawyer continue her "obstruction" of
his cross-examination.
There were revelations about the informal
relationships between Commission investigators and police forces and the
Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Mr. Steacy,
among the Commission's main 13.1 investigators, said he has asked for and
received information from law enforcement "maybe a dozen times," and
twice provided information to them.
But, for skeptics of human rights commissions,
the coup de grace came first thing in the morning, when Alain Monfette, director of the law enforcement support team for
Bell Canada, took the witness stand.
He had been subpoenaed to explain who logged
on to the Web site freedominion.ca as Jadewarr in
December, 2006, just as bloggers were using technical data to reveal it as Mr. Steacy's online identity.
Later in the day, Mr. Steacy
testified that the name Jadewarr "is actually a
short for for Jade Warrior, which is a character from
a novel I read as a teenager." He said access to the account was shared by
at least five people, including investigators, their superiors and Mr. Steacy's personal assistants (he has been blind since
2004). He said there was no managerial oversight of what investigators did
under this identity, although he said "the manager would be aware of what
was going on."
Once Mr. Hadjis
explicitly ordered him to do so, Mr. Monfette
reported that Bell's technical staff learned that whoever logged on as Jadewarr that day in 2006 had accessed the Internet through
a Bell account controlled by Nellie Hechme. He gave
the phone number and the street address of the apartment where the account was
registered.
By the morning coffee break, associates of Mr.
Lemire had already tracked down the value of Ms. Hechme's apartment, but not her identity. And by the end of
the day, the Commission's lawyer Margot Blight said that Ms. Hechme remains a mystery to everyone involved, including
Mr. Lemire's team.
Reached by phone last night, Ms. Hechme, 26, told the National Post she has no connection to
the tribunal, has never known any of the investigators, and has never accessed
a Web site as Jadewarr. She said that in the relevant
period in 2006 she did have a Bell Sympatico account
with a wireless connection that was not password controlled,
meaning anyone within range of her apartment could have accessed the Internet
with it.
She does, however, have a link to Bell Canada.
She has been employed there, though not in the Internet division, since before
2006. She had never heard of this Jadewarr issue
before, and was disturbed that her name had been publicly disclosed, by her
employer no less, without so much as a heads-up.
Even before the lunchbreak
yesterday, her identity was the subject of feverish speculation on Web sites
supportive of Mr. Lemire, which also posted her
address. By the late afternoon, someone had dug up her old MySpace page, in a
mass online investigation that no doubt continued into the wee hours of this
morning.
It was just the most prominent of awkward
moments for an unusually long and complicated tribunal hearing whose ending, to judge by the tone of the discussion in the
late afternoon, has come as a blessed relief to all involved.
Notably, however, we all await the decision.