Feds to Appeal Ruling in Vancouver Safe-Injection Site Case Federal Attorney General Rob Nicholson announced earlier this week that the government would seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court in PHS Community Services Society v Canada (Attorney General), 2010 BCCA 15. "This case raises important questions regarding the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity and the […]
TheCourt.ca is very pleased to reproduce the decisions of the Women’s Court of Canada. In 2004, this group of feminist/equality Charter activists, lawyers, and academics, decided to do something about what they saw as the sorry state of equality jurisprudence under s. 15. Their solution - rewrite the key decisions of the Supreme Court of […]
Last Wednesday, hope for justice in Darfur was renewed with the news that the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court ("ICC") opened the door for an arrest warrant on the charge of genocide to be issued against Sudanese President Omar Hussein Ahmad Al Bashir. The Prosecutor hopes to add genocide to the existing arrest […]
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. In the early days of Confederation, the constitutional seedling needed protection from winds and rains (centripetal forces drawing Canadian attention back across the seas or immediately to the south) which might have stunted or bent its growth. Next, the sapling needed protection from provincial governments with many of the […]
Health care undertakings by a province are potentially immune from criminal law. That is the conclusion reached by a 2-1 majority in PHS Community Services Society v Canada (Attorney General), 2010 BCCA 15 [PHS]. The case concerned Insite, a Vancouver clinic which provides a safe place for addicts to use drugs, and the applicability of […]
On January 27, 2010, the UK Supreme Court struck down two UK Orders in Council that formed the entirety of the country's terror financing and asset-freezing law (Her Majesty's Treasury v Mohammed Jabar Ahmed and others; Mohammed al-Ghabra; Hani El Sayed Sabaei Youssef, [2010] UKSC 2; [2010] UKSC 5. The Court held the laws to be ultra […]
YouTube Lives as California Gay Marriage Trial Re-Enacted It's Hollywood to the rescue. The U.S. Supreme Court may have nixed District Court Judge Vaughn Walker's plans to make video of the trial in Perry v Schwarzenegger, the so-called California gay marriage case, available publicly on YouTube, but an enterprising group of Los Angeles-based filmmakers have decided to […]
If the name Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab doesn't ring a bell, you might know him better as the "Christmas Day bomber." On December 25, Abdulmutallab managed to avoid the "rigorous" airline security in Amsterdam and boarded Flight 253 heading to Detroit with explosives strapped to his underwear. As Flight 253 began its descent towards Detroit, Abdulmutallab […]
In accepting the Criminal Lawyers’ Association’s 2009 G. Arthur Martin Medal, Justice Marc Rosenberg observed Parliament’s increasingly punitive approach to sentencing demonstrated by, in part, “the narrowing, almost to the vanishing point, [of] the circumstances in which a conditional sentence can be imposed.” Bill C-9 came into force in December 2007 and effected this “narrowing” so […]
On January 11th, 2010, the Ontario Court of Appeal ("ONCA") released its decision in Hydro One Inc. v. Ontario (Financial Services Commission), 2010 ONCA 6 [Hydro One], permitting the Financial Services Commission of Ontario ("FSCO") to order a partial wind-up of a pension plan affected by the reorganization of a business where a “significant” number of […]