The war on free speech reaches its Stalingrad

The Human Rights Commission and other enemies of free speech may finally be smashed.

Hedley Thomas:

Gillian Triggs is flatly rejecting claims of bias but is giving cartoonist Bill Leak a fortnight to produce evidence to try to persuade the Human Rights Commission that he was not being racist in his drawing of an Aboriginal man’s reckless parenting.

The commission’s president has decided to press ahead with an investigation of Leak and The Australian for allegedly breaching section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act...

A separate 18C civil case against three Queensland University of Technology students will be decided today in the Federal Circuit Court in Brisbane.

Incredible. Triggs' commission declares Leak guilty of racism, advertises for complaints, accepts one that's clearly a stretch - and still claims it can be trusted to deal with Leak impartially.

What rank impudence.

PS

A question. If the judge today rules that the case against the three QUT students is indeed an outrageous attack on free speech and a gross abuse of state power, will the three other students who handed over $5000 each to make their persecutor go away get their money back?

UPDATE

No wonder they'd rather be allowed to adminster their "justice" without media scrutiny:

Professor Triggs and her dele­gate, Jodie Ball, also signalled that they wanted The Australian to cease reporting developments during the “investigation and conciliation” phase of the case.

How telling.

UPDATE

Chris Merritt notes another example of the bias of Triggs' Australian Human Rights Commission - and one that's profoundly important, given her assault on your free speech:

A schedule to the AHRC Act contains the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Yet this treaty seems to have been applied by the commission in some cases but not in others.

Consider the 2014 case of Indonesian refugee John Basikbasik. He used a bicycle to batter to death his pregnant de facto wife and had been lawfully detained. He could not be deported to Indonesia because he was a refugee and he could not be released because he had been assessed as being a danger to society.

The government had complied with Australian law. But Triggs was not happy. She wanted Basikbasik to be given $350,000 compensation. She said the government had breached Article 9(1) of the ICCPR that covers arbitrary detention. In that case, the commission gave priority to Article 9(1), not Australian law.

Yet it seems to have taken the opposite approach in the QUT case and in another case involving section 18C — that of The Australian’s cartoonist Bill Leak. It gave priority to section 18C and remained silent about another provision in the ICCPR — Article 19(2) — which has some clear guidance about the importance of free speech.

It says: “Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.”

If the commission were applying the ICCPR in a consistent manner, the community would be hearing a great deal more about Article 19(2) and how Australian law measures up to this international standard. But its silence on Article 19(2) and its advocacy for section 18C give the impression that its methods are verging on the arbitrary.

(Thanks to readers Peter of Bellevue Hill, Dwight and Margaret.)