The Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal from a slew of media organizations challenging confidentiality orders issued in a secret criminal trial, with no paper trail, that was held in Quebec.
The secret trial only came to light after the defendant chose to appeal the verdict before the Quebec Court of Appeal. The trial did not have a case number and was never filed in the province’s judicial archives. As disturbingly, the names of the defence lawyer, the Crown prosecutor and the judge were excluded from the public record as were the offence, date and location of where the trial took place. Moreover, witnesses were interviewed out of court, and the parties asked the judge to decide the case based on transcripts.
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