In a five-four decision, Supreme Court rules that comedian Mike Ward did not breach the limits of free speech.

Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of a comedian who mocked a disabled teenaged singer in a long-running case testing free speech laws in the world’s second-largest country.

In a split five-four decision, the court said the comedian’s remarks were disgraceful, but they would not lead reasonable people to discriminate, as the singer had claimed.

Friday’s ruling ended an 11-year saga in the predominately French-speaking province of Quebec. A majority of justices said the case brought by the singer had not met the high bar set by Quebec law for proving discrimination.

The justices wrote that comedian Mike Ward had ridiculed Jeremy Gabriel, a young man with Treacher Collins syndrome, but he was chosen as a target because of his fame rather than his disability.

“Although Mr. Ward said some nasty and disgraceful things about Mr. Gabriel’s disability, his comments did not incite the audience to treat Mr. Gabriel as subhuman,” the justices wrote.

Born with a congenital disorder marked by skull and facial deformities as well as deafness, Gabriel started to sing after an operation for a hearing aid. A teenager at the time, he performed with legendary Canadian singer Celine Dion and for Pope Benedict XVI.

In a series of shows between 2010 and 2013, Ward said people were being nice to the teen only because they thought he would soon die. Ward joked that when he realised this was not going to happen, he had tried to drown Gabriel.

Reasonable people would not view the comments as inciting others to vilify Gabriel on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination in Quebec law, the majority justices wrote.

Ward cannot be blamed for Gabriel’s classmates repeating his jokes to tease the singer, the justices explained.

Known for sometimes offensive humour, the justices wrote that Ward’s comments “exploited, rightly or wrongly, a feeling of discomfort in order to entertain, but they did little more than that”.

In 2016, Quebec’s human rights tribunal ordered Ward to pay 35,000 Canadian dollars ($28,280) in damages to Gabriel. This was upheld by Quebec’s court of appeal, which said the mocking comments had compromised Gabriel’s rights. The Supreme Court’s decision overturns that ruling.

“We did it … we won,” Ward tweeted after the decision was announced on Friday.

Gabriel, now 24, told a news conference that Ward’s jokes caused him to become suicidal at age 13.

The ruling, Gabriel said, makes him worried about children being open targets for comedians.

“If someone like a really well-known comedian can say those things about a child and not be guilty or have to be responsible for those words, I mean, after that what are we going to say about children?”

The four dissenting justices maintained that Gabriel’s right to dignity was violated by Ward’s jokes.

“Wrapping such discriminatory conduct in the protective cloak of speech does not make it any less intolerable when that speech amounts to wilful emotional abuse of a disabled child,” they wrote.