Shane Martinez

Shane Ruttle Martinez is a Canadian activist best known for being a witness in a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal case concerning an alleged hate group.
He is currently a student of Law at The University of New Brunswick where he ran for Vice-President of Student Services of the University of New Brunswick Student Union as a candidate for United for Change.
Journalism
Martinez began his career in student journalism in 1999 with campus radio station CHSR-FM in Fredericton, New Brunswick. For one year Martinez was also the assistant director of the news department, and hosted the Cuban news and music program Radio Rebelde (named after the national radio station by the same name in Havana, Cuba).
Anti-fascist activism
In 2004, Martinez, who was by then living in Ontario, was interviewed as a member of ARA Toronto in a Canwest News Service article to give an opinion about a former neo-Nazi who was studying to become a pastor.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal
In November 2006, and April 2007, Martinez appeared as the chief witness for the Canadian Human Rights Commission before hearings of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in Penticton, British Columbia. The hearings involved a motion by the applicant to add John David Beck of Kelowna as a respondent in the complaint filed by the Montreal-based Centre for Research Action on Race Relations against the website bcwhitepride.com. The case was the was the first to receive a hearing at the Tribunal despite a person or organization not being listed as the respondent.
Martinez testified that while participating in an international development program in the Caribbean, he conducted an investigation into the website of the B.C. White Pride group, which was suspected to be based in the lower mainland of British Columbia. In the course of his investigation, he said that he was able to identify Beck as the person responsible for the website. In records provided by Martinez, Beck allegedly stated that he is a "co-founder" of B.C. White Pride, and that he also wrote much of the content which was on the group's website. Shortly after identifying Beck as the party responsible for the website, Martinez provided the information to a lawyer. He was then contacted by the Canadian Human Rights Commission approximately two years later, and was asked to provide an affidavit and supporting evidence from the investigation, which would later be used in the case.
As a result of his affidavit, he was the recipient of death threats from white supremacists, and was libeled online in an Internet-based defamation campaign. Counsel for the Commission stated that the death threats and defamation were coordinated attempts by white supremacists to intimidate Martinez before he was to provide testimony, and in the event he still testified, discredit that which he said. Human rights activists who monitored the attempted intimidation and defamation campaign, noted that it failed to achieve any of its objectives, since Martinez still proceeded to testify.
On January 9, 2008, Member Athanasios D. Hadjis of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal returned a ruling in favour of complaint lodged by the CRARR, stating that the allegations regarding Beck were substantiated. Beck was found to have violated s. 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, for posting material online "...that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination." Member Hadjis stated that the material "unquestionably exposed" disabled persons, Jews, and visible minorities to "hatred and extreme contempt". The testimony of Martinez linking Beck to the website, and the testimony of Fo Niemi of CRARR used to identify the hateful content, was heavily relied on by Member Hadjis in reaching his decision. The final ruling resulted in a fine of $6,000 against Beck, and a permanent cease and desist order prohibiting him from further posting hate material online.
Electoral politics
Martinez was nominated as a candidate for the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada in the 2006 federal election in Toronto Centre
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