Three members of the white-supremacist Heritage Front, including a Jewish member and the group’s president, were jailed here last week for operating a racist telephone hot line in defiance of a previous court order.
Justice Danielle Tremblay-Lamer sentenced Heritage Front President Wolfgang Droege, 44, to three months in jail for willfully violating an August 1992 Federal Court injunction forbidding the white-supremacist group from broadcasting racist statements. He also received a fine of about U.S. $3,600.
Gary Schipper, 42, who as an adopted child was raised as a Jew but subsequently renounced his family, was sentenced to two months. His voice appeared on prerecorded hot line messages targeting Jews, indigenous peoples, blacks and other minorities.
Schipper recorded some 505 messages on the Heritage Front hot line from the spring of 1992 until it was shut down by the Federal Court of Canada last October.
Another member, Kenneth Barker, 32, was sentenced to one month. The judge said she was taking into consideration the fact that Barker was a single parent raising a child.
In May 1992, following a joint complaint filed by the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Native Canadian Center, the Canadian Human Rights Commission launched an inquiry into the Heritage Front’s use of telephone lines to transmit hate messages.
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