Down With Everybody

You’ve gotta hand it to Babs. She knows how to keep the business booming. “Education” is a bureaucrat’s euphemism for “Money.”

Barbara Hall, Ontario Human Rights Commissioner:

“Everyone should be able to fish without fear in Ontario,” Hall told Osprey News.

“We need to protect individuals - for example Asian-Canadians who’ve been victims of racist attacks. But we also need to do the long-term systemic education that gets rid of the stereotypes that cause such attacks.”

…

Hall said the commission will watch what happens this summer and may issue another report this fall.

The rest.

Yahoo! learned the hard way that inattention to human rights can have devasting consequences. While some may see the new program as no more than an effort to restore the company’s reputation, we strongly applaud this new effort. Companies have an obligation to respect human rights and rigorous due diligence and risk assessment are the right place to start.

The rest.

[Reuters, Geneva, May 16, 2008] A special U.N. human rights investigator will visit the United States this month to probe racism, an issue that has forced its way into the race to secure the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

The United Nations said Doudou Diene would meet federal and local officials, as well as lawmakers and judicial authorities during the May 19-June 6 visit.

…

Diene, a Senegalese lawyer who has served in the independent post since 2002, will report his findings to the U.N. Human Rights Council next year.

vs.

[BBC, Senegal, May 9, 2008] The Senegalese army has launched an offensive against rebels in the southern Casamance region, after 16 villagers had their left ears cut off.

Quebec’s human rights commission has asked the city of Saguenay to stop praying before council meetings.

The commission says the prayer goes against the city’s obligation as a public entity to remain neutral on questions of religion, and violates religious freedom.

The rest.

The Capilano Students’ Union:

In the view of the executive, this clearly indicated the Heartbeats’ anti-choice agenda. They were denied club status primarily out of respect for the human right of women not to be threatened with the profound discrimination of having control over our bodies taken away. The executive had, and has, the responsibility to weigh many factors, including: what the law says, what the CSU constitution says, what the rules of procedural fairness are, and the human right of all of us to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Okay, so the human right to have an abortion trumps freedom of assembly. Fine. But wait! Then the CSU defenders of human rights found out what it’s like to be threatened and dragged through the human rights process:

[August 29, 2007] B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ruled it will hear a complaint made by a group of Capilano College students who said it was twice denied “club” status by the college’s students’ union because of its anti-abortion stance based on religious views.

And the winner is…

[May 15, 2008] In January of 2008, the tribunal rejected a request by the CSU to dismiss the Heartbeat Club’s complaint.  This morning, the two parties reached an agreement that will finally give Heartbeat a chance to be recognized as an official CSU club, allowing them to utilize the University’s facilities in order to carry out their mission.

How do you like your human rights now, CSU?

“We have been fighting for 18 years to bring Hissène Habré to justice, and time is running out. Unless Senegal takes action soon, there won’t be any victims left at the trial,” said Souleymane Guengueng, founder of the Chadian Association of Victims of Political Repression and Crime (AVCRP), and the lead petitioner in the case that led to the UN ruling. “Senegal has mocked us for eight years and now it is mocking the United Nations.”

The rest.

Human Rights Watch yesterday criticized a Dutch law forcing some would-be immigrants to pass a language and culture test before arrival, branding it discriminatory. 

The rest.

Making it illegal for children aged 16 to 18 to leave school could be a breach of their human rights, a parliamentary committee said today, creating yet another embarrassment for Gordon Brown.

The rest.

Toronto Sun:

More than 5,000 convenience store owners have not yet installed “garage-style” coverings that will hide cigarettes from consumers to meet new regulations, the Ontario Convenience Stores Association says. The group is calling on the government to grant an extension past the May 31 compliance deadline.

“There is so much confusion,” association president Dave Bryans said today. “There are only six or seven companies that can install the covers and there’s many stores who won’t have it done on time.”

…

“But this is not about punishing the little guy,” Health Promotion Ministry spokesman Rick Byun said. “This is about helping people get healthy.”

True, moron, many store owners will get healthy by doing arm curls all day.

The South Asian Post, an influential Vancouver-based weekly, ran an editorial this week supporting Maclean’s in its ongoing dispute with the Canadian Islamic Congress. In ‘Why you should care about Muslims vs. Maclean’s,’ the Post’s editors wrote that “[i]f we as Canadians truly value freedom of the press and free speech as the cornerstones of our democracy, we must protect them with the same vigor.”

The rest.