Justice committees seek direct referrals from KRPF

Justice committees in six Nunavik communities are trying to re-establish Inuit traditional practices for dealing with criminal offenses.

They want to work with offenders in the community instead of punishing them by shipping them off to jail.

But to do this more effectively, justice committees say they need more support from communities, governments and the courts.

Two weeks ago, Nunavik’s justice committee members met in Puvirnituq to see how far they have come since the region’s first committees started in 2001 and to decide where they want to go.

“We got a clear idea of what we want to work on,” said Lucy Grey, the Makivik Corp.’s justice committee coordinator.

Top on the justice committees’ list of priorities is to shorten the time most cases take to go through the region’s overburdened travelling court system.

Grey said delays in court continue to cause stress, because they reopen old wounds for victims and offenders, sometimes even leading those involved to commit suicide.

To speed up the system, justice committees want the Kativik Regional Police Force to have the power to divert some cases directly to them, as the RCMP already may do in Nunavut.

Grey said justice committees also want Inuit traditional laws and customs to be written down. This will take more money.

The committees receive funding from the provincial and federal governments. The federal government matches the amount Quebec gives.

Justice committee members are essentially volunteers, receiving a small honorarium, but Grey said there’s a lot of administrative paperwork attached to each case the justice committees consider and there’s not enough money to pay anyone to do this.

“If justice committees were able to access that funding, they could do a lot more,” Grey said.

Since 2001, when Makivik first received money to start justice committees, Kuujjuaraapik, Puvirnituq, Salluit, Kangirsuk, Quaqtaq and Aupaluk have established justice committees.

In Puvirnituq, as justice committee members recently met for the first time, they discussed their activities, talked about traditional Inuit law, and met with legal expert Pierre Rousseau about the clash between Inuit and western justice systems.

Rousseau, who worked as a Crown prosecutor in Nunavut and Nunavik, recently published an academic paper that described the northern justice system as a “a scene of ethnic conflict.”

“The elders felt someone understood them and it validated their desire to bring in Inuit traditional practices,” Grey said.

Justice committees are mandated to provide mediation, do prevention activities and provide advice to the court. Crown prosecutors are only permitted to refer certain cases to the justice committee.

“It hasn’t been working very well because the cases that the Crown prosecutor is allowed to send them are very, very restricted,” said Makivik lawyer Jocelyn Barrett.

Instead, judges are starting to refer cases to the justice committees at the pre-sentencing stage. They’re referred some serious cases, Barrett said, including those that involve conjugal violence – something prosecutors can’t do, according to the existing protocol.

Martin Scott, one of Aupaluk’s five-member justice committee, said cooperation between the judge, the offender and community is the key to making a committee’s interventions work.

When considering a conjugal violence case, justice committees meet with both offenders and family members. The offender must be willing to admit responsibility and be willing to work with the committee. At the same time, the family and the victim are consulted to see whether the offender should stay in the community or go to jail.

“In most cases, people can be talked to, counseled by elders. Elders used to intervene – they don’t do that anymore, but justice committees are doing this again,” Scott said. “It’s an alternative to a system that just doesn’t seem to be working.”

Scott said sending someone away to jail as a deterrent can be a bad solution.

“This man under house arrest or other conditions will much better serve his community and his family.”

However, those at the recent justice committee meeting in Puvirnituq recognized that extreme crimes call for extreme consequences, such as long jail sentences.

But they were impressed by the impact of justice committees in the Yukon, where Rousseau told them, the need for a new territorial jail disappeared because many cases were successfully resolved outside of the penal system.

Nunavik’s justice committees, suggested Scott, could save money better spent on additional resources, such as shelters, counselors and a safe house for men.

“So many things could be diverted or averted if there were these resources,” Scott said.

The communities of Kuujjuaq, Inukjuak and Kangiqsujuaq have also expressed interest in having justice committees, but no money is available to start up more committees.