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The best, the most pointed and comprehensive opinion on the award of the Order of Canada pin to Henry Morgentaler, in the course of this long grim week, was by Ian Hunter in the National Post: “In old Canada, Morgentaler was prosecuted and sent to jail for performing illegal abortions. But that was in another era and, as far as I'm concerned, another country -- a country as dead as any of the recipients of Morgentaler’s attentions.” I shall say something about that award tomorrow. For today I want to focus on the New Canada -- the one that is...

Earlier this week, I argued that Canada's human-rights censors have managed a seemingly impossible task: They've found a way to rehabilitate the image of neo-Nazis, transforming them from odious dirtbags into principled free-speech martyrs. Case in point: At this week's much-anticipated human-rights hearing in Ottawa, a team of journalists and bloggers were campaigning openly in support of hatemonger Marc Lemire. The villains were Canadian Human Rights Commission (HRC) investigator Dean Steacy and the other apparatchik who've made a career out of parsing Lemire's phobic Web postings. Tuesday's hearing probably won't change the outcome of the case against Lemire: Like a...

A shadow legal body was set up by the Defense Department to manipulate the prosecutions of U.S. Marines accused of massacring Iraqi civilians in Haditha in 2005. That’s the bombshell disclosure from the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm that is representing one of the accused Marines, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani. And it could prove to be the most damning piece of evidence showing the political motivations behind the ongoing prosecutions of the Haditha Marines. “The hysteria and media firestorm over Abu Ghraib and the Pat Tillman investigations led to fear of a similar media reaction...

St. Cloud is getting a new office with the power to investigate discrimination cases. Gov. Tim Pawlenty announced the city's new human rights office on Monday morning at a Martin Luther King Junior Day celebration at St. Cloud City Hall. More than a dozen bias-motivated incidents have been reported at St. Cloud State University since November, including swastikas and a report of white men spitting at a female student of color. Police, the university and the local FBI have been investigating. The new human rights office will have the power to enforce Minnesota's human rights law and reach out to...

September 30, 2005--On the second evening following the indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a growing number of Americans believe the charges against the powerful Republican are politically motivated. On Wednesday night, 43% said the charges were based upon the facts involved while 31% said they were politically motivated.On Thursday, following a full day of news coverage, 37% said the charges were based upon the facts while 39% said they were politically motivated.The rest of the data changed little from night to night. Seventeen percent (17%) had a favorable opinion of DeLay on both nights. Overall, 38% had an...

On 10th September 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia imposed defence counsel on its most famous defendant, Slobodan Milosevic. This decision overturned previous rulings: the Prosecution had tried, at the beginning of the trial, to force a lawyer on Milosevic, and the judges had addressed the issue several times during the hearings. On 3rd July 2001, the very first day of the trial, the presiding judge, the late Sir Richard May, said, “Mr. Milosevic, I see that you’re not represented by counsel today. We understand that this is of your own choice. You do have the right,...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Paris - Washington has agreed that Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO commander and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, can testify in the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic. But the Bush administration has demanded the right to edit videotapes and transcripts of the sessions before they are made public.The former opponents, the general and the formal president of Yugoslavia, will face each other in court Monday and Tuesday, but the sessions will be behind closed doors, with the public gallery off limits and minus the usual television and internet broadcasts.Closed sessions are routine at the U.N....

Military Justice& Other Oxymorons Abraham Lincoln vs the Sioux Paul Weber When King George the Second (surnamed Bush) announced that some of the soldiers (or is it detainees? or criminals?) captured in the undeclared war in Afghanistan would be tried in military tribunals, a lot of people got twisted out of shape. Military Tribunals, it seems, are not open to the public; the military serves as judge, jury, and hangman; and the accused can be convicted and sentenced to summary execution merely on a "preponderance of the evidence", rather than the usual "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" standard used in...