After the Mouvement laïque québécois, it is Quebec’s turn to demand that Justice Mahmud Jamal of the Supreme Court of Canada recuse himself from the case surrounding the State Secularism Act, so that he is not “judge and jury.”
In a letter sent to the Court on Wednesday, and which The duty obtained a copy, the Attorney General of Quebec (AGQ) expressed his discomfort with the participation in the case of the magistrate, who sat until 2019 on the board of directors of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), one of the plaintiffs.
“A reasonable and well-informed person would be concerned that Judge Jamal lacks the impartiality required to hear this case,” he wrote.
By intervening in this way, the Attorney General, Simon Jolin-Barrette, is imitating the Mouvement laïque québécois (MLQ), which sent a first request for recusal last week, due to “serious and reasonable fear of bias.”
In its letter to the country’s highest court, the PGQ presents essentially the same reasons as the MLQ. It points out that Justice Jamal, appointed to the Supreme Court in 2021, still held a seat on the ACLC’s board of directors when the latter filed a first application before the Superior Court of Quebec in June 2019.
But that’s not all: “at that time, and in previous years (from September 2018 to June 2019), Judge Jamal was not only a member of the Association’s board of directors, but he was even its president, as appears from the ‘questionnaire relating to the process for nominating judges to the Supreme Court of Canada'”, we can read in the AGQ’s letter.
“As president of the Association, Judge Jamal was necessarily involved in some way in the preparation” of the file challenging Bill 21, Quebec argues. “The role that Judge Jamal played in the swearing in of the main witness of the[ACLC] testifies to this involvement.”
“Judge and party”
In a communication dated last week, the Registrar of the Supreme Court had advised the parties involved of Justice Jamal’s intentions not to recuse himself.
” [Il] considered the opinion and believes that there is no real or reasonably discernible conflict of interest that would cause him to recuse himself,” it read. “He was at no time a solicitor of record in the proceedings that gave rise to this application for leave to appeal and he has no recollection of having provided any legal advice in those proceedings.”
Arguments that did not convince the Quebec government. “The fact that Judge Jamal must decide questions of constitutional law raised by the Association at the time he was presiding over it means that he would today be the judge in a case in which he was a party,” argued the PGQ in its request for recusal.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, along with student Ichrak Nourel Hak and the National Council of Canadian Muslims, is among those challenging the most recent decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal on Bill 21. In this judgment, rendered in February, the court of second instance validated almost all of the provisions of the law on religious neutrality.