Around twenty members of the Montreal Hasidic community will not have to pay the tickets they received for failing to comply with the curfew during the pandemic due to unreasonable delays in court.
The latter wanted to challenge in court the constitutionality of the curfew imposed by the Quebec government, claiming that it violated “both their religious freedom and their right to freedom.”
The 22 members of the community, represented by Me Jessy Héroux, had received these tickets in 2021 and 2022, when Quebec imposed a curfew from 8 p.m.
The then Council of Hasidic Jews of Quebec turned to the courts to allow its members to avoid the curfew because the third prayer had to be held 2:30 hours after sunset. However, her application was rejected.
After receiving the violation reports, members turned to the courts to have them invalidated. Cases of this type must be heard within 18 months due to the Jordan ruling.
However, it is likely that between 23 and 32 months have passed between the start of the prosecution initiated by the Director of Criminal and Prosecution and the dates scheduled for next April for the proceedings and applications for unconstitutionality.
In total, 23 files had to be summarized and all conducted with the help of a Yiddish-French interpreter, which tends to “complicate a file that should initially be simple,” said Justice of the Peace Johanne White. in his decision handed down this week at the Montreal courthouse.
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Hearings for breaches of the Public Health Act must take place before the presiding justice of the peace. The latter, of which there are only eight in Montreal, have to hear thousands of cases every year in areas as diverse as occupational health and safety, environmental protection and road safety.
No judge was brought in to hear the hundreds of additional cases created by the various findings related to the pandemic, Judge White emphasized.
“The applicants’ lawyer is therefore not entirely wrong when he claims that the legislature has created new public health crimes without necessarily allocating sufficient resources to deal with these files,” she clarified, declaring a stay in these 23 cases of the procedure.
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