Via email:
(transcript)
Question: Prime minister, I will it [sic] off the cabinet topic for today. A little while ago, since the campaign, a lot of Canadians were expecting outrage at a young journalist in Afghanistan going to jail for a long time because of something he (inaudible), not exactly the kind of Canadian value that our troops and money are going to support. So I would ike to ask you first off if this is an issue you have raised with president Karzai and if not, wil you? And also here at home, the issue of the human rights commission, we have seen both federal and provincial human rights commissions taking media organizations, journalists before them to justify what they have written and I was wondering if your government will be touching that topic?
Stephen Harper: Well, first of all, on the – on the case in Afghanistan, this is obviously a case that is of some considerable concern to us. It has been raised with the government of Afghanistan at the highest levels. You do have to remember though that part of what is at issue here is that this is a process in a court system that does, in Afghanistan as in Canada, does operate independently of political decision-makers. So you know, we will continue to express our concerns and obviously there remain further levels of appeal in this particular case. So we hope that it will – that some of these decisions will be changed, but you know, the political actors in Afghanistan don’t necessarily have any more control over that than I would in our country.
In terms of the free speech issues and some of the activities of human rights commissions, I think that everyone has had some concerns about this. This is a complicated area of law, balancing what most people understand to mean by free speech with obvious desire to not have speech that would be intended to incite hatred towards particular groups or individuals. I think some of the most egregious cases, if you actually look at this, are in provincial human rights commission and obviously, you know I can’t control or comment on that. I think there has been some – I think the Canadian human rights commission has been moderating some of what – some of its practices a little bit recently to respond to some of these concerns and I hope that will continue.
/imported/2008/10.31/0000/harper_on_hrcs.mp3
