In hearings in Geneva, Canada was hauled on the carpet for its treatment of blacks, Arabic-looking people, aboriginals and Chinese, because of the head tax leveled on Chinese immigrants a century ago.

Canada is a nation under the rule of law with some of the toughest anti-discrimination laws in the world, made even beefier by Canada’s activist courts. Cases of discrimination are pursued in Canada. As I said in media interviews last week, the UN show trial on Canada is a bizarre waste of time when so many people of so many colours and ethnic groups are being oppressed in so many places.

The committee’s accomplishments seem limited to maintaining highly-paid UN bureaucrats in the style to which they have become accustomed in Geneva. Surely, the UN has better uses for our money.

Even worse, the UN wants the right to censure free speech in Canada. That Canada has imposed restriction on internet speech “shows [Canadians] have accepted there are exceptions to free speech” and therefore we should allow the UN to impose more restrictions on speech, said Regis de Goutte, a French member of the UN committee.

Free speech is meant to protect even ugly talk. If free speech only guards the politically correct, then free speech disappears and repression sets in.

Racist views are best fought in public, where they can be shown to be hateful fantasy. Governments fertilize racism when they impose censorship. That suggests racist views are so appealing they must be suppressed, and that gives people reason to believe there must be some truth in racist talk.

When the shackles were lifted off the old communist states, where free speech of any kind was suppressed, a wave of xenophobia and racism swept these lands, most horribly in Yugoslavia. Under Yugoslavia’s communist regime, Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats could never air their problems. Hate festered underground, and then burst out in flames of violence.

In the United States, there are virtually no limits on free speech. Anti-racist groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, often take the side of racist groups when government attempts to suppress speech.

Despite the United States ugly history of racism and the divisive civil rights struggle of the 1960s, free speech, not repression, have virtually removed racist talk from the political forum. No credible political party or leader in the United States has a racist agenda. The closest thing is Pat Buchanan, whose protectionist and nationalist views put him closer to Maud Barlow than France’s xenophobic, anti-semitic Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Buchanan received less than half of one per cent of the vote in the 2000 US presidential elections. Across continental Europe, where the type of censorship demanded by the United Nations is common, racist parties receive millions of votes. France’s Regis de Goutte may lecture Canada on the need for censorship, but back in France, Le Pen came second in the presidential election.

This isn’t the UN’s only attack on free speech. The recent UN Human Development Report selected South Africa’s Human Rights Commission for special praise.

Yet, this commission has attacked free speech in South Africa, targeting the Mail & Guardian newspaper, a critic of apartheid under the old regime. The charge was “subliminal racism.” A sociologist hired by the commission claimed a picture of birds pecking through garbage sublimely implied public services had deteriorated in South Africa under black rule, and was thus racist, never mind the picture was taken in Uganda and had no reference to South Africa.

The UN report praised the commission for promoting “respect for human rights” and said its work “enhanced the prospect of a popular consensus.”

Racism is an ugly thing, but it is best solved by free speech and understanding, not repression and distrust.