Court: Ayo Kimathi Stoplist Appeal Is Refused
The application to quash the Minister’s decision to place Ayo Kimathi on the stop list is refused, the Court has ruled, saying the Minister had “legal authority to make the Decision” and “was entitled to find that the conditions” for excluding the applicant were met because some of the statements made “amounted to hate speech” and were not protected by the “guarantees for freedom of expression” in the Constitution.
Mr Kimathi was put on the stop list in September 2015 by then Minister of Home Affairs Michael Fahy after he spoke in Bermuda in September 2016, with the Minister saying Mr. Kimathi’s comments about homosexuality and interracial partnerships are “entirely offensive and propagate hatred.”
The American citizen subsequently appealed the decision, with Chief Justice Ian Kawaley ruling that the application to quash the Minister’s decision is refused, adding that he sees “no justification for finding that placing the 1st Applicant on the stop list was a disproportionate response to the unfiltered message of hate.”
Screenshot from a video of Mr Kimathi speaking in Bermuda in 2015:
The ruling stated, “In my judgment it required very little analysis to entitle the Minister to conclude that encouraging Bermudians of African descent to regard Europeans, Arabs and Asians as their enemies, encouraging African Bermudians to pursue a separatist economic and social agenda [which included shunning African Bermudian homosexuals altogether] amounted to ‘hate speech’.
It further noted that the “passing swipes the 1st Applicant made against ‘feminists’ fell on the margins of promoting hatred towards and discrimination against women looked at in isolation from the other remarks, but added a further layer to the ‘discrimination’ analysis.”
“In all the circumstances of the present case, I see no justification for finding that placing the 1st Applicant on the stop list was a disproportionate response to the unfiltered message of hate which, coming in a cultural history lecture series, could not fairly be said to form part of an ongoing political debate.”
The conclusion said, “The application against the 1st and 2nd Respondents to quash the Minister’s September 28, 2015 decision to place the 1st Applicant on the stop list under section 31[5] of BIPA is refused.
“The Minister had legal authority to make the Decision and was entitled to find that the conditions for excluding the 1st Applicant were met because some of the statements the 1st Applicant made at the public lecture amounted to ‘hate speech’ and were not protected by the guarantees for freedom of expression under section 9 of the Constitution.
“The offending statements asserted, inter alia, that
- [a] persons of European descent were enemies of persons of African descent with perverted sexual practices and were engaged in a campaign that amounted to genocide against persons of African descent
- [b] persons of African descent should, to protect themselves from this attack, pursue a racially separatist agenda both economically and socially, shunning interracial relationships, and
- [c] persons of African descent were entitled to be homophobic, should condemn black parents who accept the alternative sexual orientation of their children and should generally shun homosexuals who were “freaks”.
“The Minister’s Decision was upheld on the basis that he was entitled to find that the impugned remarks were likely to promote hatred towards and discrimination against various minority groups in Bermuda on the grounds of their race and/or sexual orientation.
“The constitutional rights of the Applicants under sections 8 [freedom of conscience] and 9 [freedom of expression] were not interfered with in a constitutionally impermissible manner in all the circumstances of the stop list decision.”
The 77-page court ruling is below [PDF here]
