Victims of Crime: Addressing Legal Barriers
In honour of Canada’s National Victims and Survivors of Crime Week, the John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights (JHC) hosted a virtual roundtable discussion and network gathering on November 20, 2021, to address how to best support victims and survivors of hate crimes within Alberta by strengthening a community of legal practice and advocacy.
The roundtable discussion consisted of a panel of lawyers:
Lisa Webber (practicing Indigenous and criminal law, with a focus on Indigenous women’s rights),
Arman Chak (human rights and administrative law),
Robert Lee (victims’ rights, personal injury, and civil litigation, including victims of sexual assault and child welfare), and
Jeffrey Westman (former police officer and current legal counsel for the Edmonton Police Services investigating hate crimes and incidents).
Attendees of the event consisted of a variety of people including legal professionals, members from the Alberta Hate Crimes Committee, and non-profit organizations from Alberta. The discussion that followed identified that there is an urgent need to build a strong provincial network that can be accessed to provide guidance and assistance on hate-related crimes within our province. The discussion also concluded that the connection and practice of the legal community and advocates in supporting victims and survivors of hate-related crimes in Alberta should be strengthened to create an accessible network of lawyers, legal professionals, and advocates willing to work on hate-related cases in the future.
Barriers to Addressing Hate Crime
The main barriers to effectively support victims of hate motivated crimes or incidents identified by the participants can been distilled into the following main points:
The lack of funds or resources to provide adequate legal support to victims and survivors of crime.
The discriminatory attitudes and practices that persist throughout the legal and justice system.
The continued limitations around access to justice due to expensive legal fees and slow and inefficient court processes.
Fear of police, institutions, and the justice system by those most marginalized.
COVID-19 generates institutional and practical barriers for those trying to access justice and legal services.
In order to improve access to justice for victims and survivors of hate crimes in Alberta, the roundtable discussion concluded that it was vital to:
Document human rights violations
File complaints to the appropriate mechanism
Follow up and proper investigation of the complaint
Network with like-minded people and/or entities to find mentorship and other opportunities
Advertise and market all the above to spread awareness
Reforming the judiciary, as judges are independent from political and public pressure and are required to uphold the law to respect human rights. We recognize that there may be a lack of accountability to human rights within the judiciary.
Find alternative processes to deal with the lack of insufficient funds and resources making access to justice inaccessible. Victims and survivors generally do not have sufficient funds to pursue court action, and it is difficult to find lawyers to work on either a pro bono or contingency basis. Additionally, depending on Legal Aid and other community-led legal resources to provide legal guidance and assistance can be time consuming and not a possible option if one does not meet the income threshold to qualify for legal assistance. The legal system allows defendants to drag out cases for a long time so that it becomes expensive and lengthy, and one cannot access justice. Lawyers cannot work for this length of time without getting paid, so this is a significant hurdle.
One possible solution discussed to make access to a lawyer feasible is to make the defendant pay the plaintiff’s legal fees through the mechanism of advanced costs or an Okanagan Order, where the judge can order the defendant to pay the legal fees of the injured party through litigation. Through using this mechanism, this could overcome the hurdle of insufficient funds to pursue remedial action through the court system. If more lawyers used this to pay their legal fees, it could create a precedent which forces the government to provide the funding for victims of crime in all cases, including child welfare and hate crimes cases.