Lawyer and journalist Steve Price will canvas the issue of hate speech and the lack of legislation for it, when he is the guest speaker at a Rainbow Wellington gathering on 26 May. Price is a lecturer in media law at Victoria University School who runs the blog Media Law Journal. His talk will be the first in a series on human rights issues by members of the Law Society Human Rights Committee, and others. Rainbow Wellington points out hate speech was in the headlines in New Zealand a few years ago when the Court of Appeal ruled that the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act could not be used to restrict an extreme homophobic fundamentalist Christian video on the grounds of hate speech. Former Chief Censor Bill Hastings spoke to Rainbow Wellington about the case, but attempts to amend the law got nowhere and in 2005 a Select Committee Inquiry on the topic was quietly dropped. The group says as far as it's aware nothing has happened to push for changes to the legislation since then, despite developments in other countries such as Canada. “Steven will bring us up-to-date on this issue, an important one for the lgbti communities (as for most minority groups), and a difficult one, with a wide variety of views even amongst liberal New Zealanders,” it says. “He will also cover the limited inclusion of hate speech in the Human Rights Act, and talk about its role on the broadcasting standards front, where there are standards relating to discrimination and denigration.” Steven Price will discuss hate speech legislation (and the lack of it), in the basement bar of S
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Thursday, 5th May 2011 - 9:27am