The Quebec Court of Appeal was wrong to use the expression “secret trial” to describe the series of errors that led the judicial system to hide the existence of criminal proceedings from the public, but it must still be corrected the shooting, decides the Supreme Court of Canada. The highest court in the country therefore partially agrees with the media and orders that a redacted version of the original judgment in this case, which remained hidden, now be published.

The Supreme Court also gives specific instructions to Canadian courts to avoid such a mess in the future, which has “jeopardized public confidence in the judicial system”.

The controversy arose in 2022, when the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned the conviction of a police informant who had been involved in what it called a “secret trial.” The name of the judge, the lawyers, the police force involved, the crime charged, the sentence requested: everything had been hidden from the public, under the pretext of protecting the identity of an informant whose life could be threatened. The case would not even have been entered in the court file register and the witnesses would have been questioned outside the court, according to the Court of Appeal, which had decried a way of doing things “incompatible with the values of a liberal democracy.”

A coalition of media, including La Presse, demanded that light be shed on several details of this affair, while keeping the identity of the accused confidential.

On Friday, the Supreme Court rendered a unanimous judgment which takes on the appearance of a lesson in semantics: if several elements were wrongly hidden from the population in this case, it was not necessarily a secret trial, the court ruled. magistrates.

“The controversy, which arose following the publication of a judgment of the Court of Appeal in March 2022 in which it inadvertently denounced the holding of a “secret trial”, lies largely in the gap between what the public knew and what they did not know, combined with the effect of the unfortunate expression used by the Court of Appeal,” the judgment states.

“In this context, it is therefore unsurprising that the present case […] arouses both public concern and indignation. The very idea that “secret trials” – that is, criminal proceedings of which there is no trace – can take place in our liberal democracy is indeed intolerable. Such instances are at odds with the democratic ideals dear to the Canadian population,” states the judgment.

However, initially, the police informant was indeed accused in a public court and his case progressed publicly for a certain time, the Supreme Court reveals for the first time. At one point, however, he submitted a request for a stay of proceedings based on his status as a police informant: he found himself accused of crimes the existence of which he himself had disclosed to the authorities as an informant, which constituted abusive conduct by state officials.

It was at this moment that the court of first instance ordered a total closed session on the entire matter and initiated a process which left no traces. However, it would have been entirely possible to proceed differently, by recording the existence of the procedures on paper, by entering the case in the court files and by publishing a redacted judgment, underlines the Supreme Court.

“It was not necessary that the request for a stay of proceedings did not appear in the docket and the docket of the court hearings, and that no formal number was assigned to it,” affirm the nine judges.

Subsequently, the Quebec Court of Appeal erred by placing the entire appeal file under seal, by refusing to publish a redacted version of the trial judgment and by using the expression “secret trial”, continues the Supreme Court.

The file will therefore be sent back to the Court of Appeal so that it, as requested by the media, prepares a version of the first instance judgment redacted of information allowing the identification of the accused, which can be published.

The country’s highest court recognizes, however, that several pieces of information, such as the name of the judge who heard the case at first instance, must remain secret because the criminal trial had begun publicly, and “because of the information known to the public regarding this case, this information is likely to be used to identify [the police informant].”