The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) awards Quebec’s criminal justice system the “Code of Silence 2022” prize for holding a secret trial whose existence was revealed by The Press.
“Holding secret trials is part of the ‘playbook’ favored by dictatorships, not democracies,” ACJ President Brent Jolly said in a statement released Tuesday.
As revealed The Press as of March 2022, the trial in question did not have a case number, and the names of the Crown prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge were not on the public record. Witnesses had also been interviewed outside the courtroom as part of it.
The latest development in the case: the Supreme Court of Canada agreed last March to hear the request of a coalition of journalistic organizations, including The Presswho wants to be able to challenge the confidentiality orders issued in the case.
The Code of Silence Awards are presented annually by the CAJ, the Center for Free Expression at Metropolitan University of Toronto (CFE) and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE).
They aim to draw public attention to government or publicly funded agencies that are working “hard” to “hide information to which the public is entitled under freedom of information legislation”, says the ACJ.