The CHR creates a guide for students, faculty and staff
As a leading post-secondary institution devoted to teaching, research, and service to the community, York advocates for an interdisciplinary orientation, critical thinking, and active citizenship among its diverse members. It is therefore both inevitable and appropriate that members within our community engage in societal debates and express themselves – in words or deeds – in ways that others find objectionable. This can lead to challenging questions around the proper balance between rights (including equality), creed-based belief, and expression.
One example of this balance involved a complaint about pamphlets from a religious organization that were found last year on campus identifying another organization as a descendant of a rebellious movement whose sole purpose was to seize power and install a regime of “merciless brutality” intent on “mass killing” and “corruption of the whole earth.” Read from a certain perspective, the pamphlet asserts ideas and arguments to support a warning; from another, the pamphlet could be viewed as containing impermissible hate.
It is in these circumstances that the Centre for Human Rights has responded to requests to clarify what constitutes hate propaganda. It is our hope that the new CHR Hate Propaganda: A Guide for Students, Faculty and Staff will be both a useful educative tool to the community and will signal the approach the university uses in the resolution of hate-related disputes.
The Guide sets out what is and what is not hate propaganda and speaks to the concepts and values of free speech, academic freedom, and freedom to engage in creed-based belief. Hate propaganda involves the public promotion or incitement of hatred against an identifiable group based on factors such as colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or mental or physical disability. It is prohibited on our campuses under university guidelines, codes and policies, the Ontario Human Rights Code, and the Criminal Code of Canada.
While restrictions on hate propaganda are reasonable in a free, democratic, and pluralist society, identifying hate propaganda is the more challenging task—one that involves a highly contextualized, fact-driven, and complex process guided and framed by a number of principles set out in several court decisions, most notably by the Supreme Court of Canada. And these must be considered as a whole.
The key to understanding the combined operation of these principles is the realization that hate is confined to the most extreme manifestations of emotion. This kind of expression conveys “detestation and vilification.” Its targets are dehumanized, delegitimized and, by the expression, likely to be exposed to “discrimination, ostracism, segregation, deportation, violence and in the most extreme cases, genocide”.
York is committed to the values of respect, equity, diversity, and inclusion and to the safety and security of all members of its community. It supports an environment conducive to freedom of inquiry and expression, where all may learn, teach, work, and live free from prejudice, harassment, and discrimination.
For further information about our values and about preventing and responding to hate propaganda, please access the CHR website: http://rights.info.yorku.ca/resource-guides/
