Nunavut courts a scene of ethnic conflict: Researcher

Nunavut’s dysfunctional justice system destroys lives, ignores Inuit culture and is a major cause of inter-ethnic conflict, a former Crown prosecutor, Pierre Rousseau, says in a recently completed research paper.

“I deliberately call it a court system or a legal system and not a justice system because I am now aware that it does not bring justice to the communities,” Rousseau writes.

Rousseau worked for 25 years as a prosecutor in Nunavut, Nunavik and other aboriginal regions of northern Canada, and describes himself as “a living witness” to the damage inflicted by the legal system on aboriginal victims, witnesses and accused persons.

He produced his paper as part of his work on a master’s degree in conflict analysis at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C. and presented a summary of it at the Inuit studies conference in Edmonton last month.

He says current attempts to tinker with the legal system — the use of interpreters, local justices of the peace, diversion programs, provisions for unilingual Inuktitut-speaking jurors, and elders’ panels sitting with judges — are just “crumbs” thrown at aboriginal communities.

“I see it as a much broader issue. I see it as a conflict between ethnic groups that are of different cultures,” Rousseau said in an interview with Nunatsiaq News.

He dedicates his thesis to two sexual assault victims — one from Resolute Bay, the other from Puvirnituq — along with “all the other aboriginal victims of the Canadian legal system who suffered because their communities had been disempowered…”

The Resolute Bay woman was the first person to disclose the sexual abuses inflicted on aboriginal children by Maurice Cloughley, an infamous teacher from New Zealand who between 1959 and 1987 molested numerous Inuit and Dene school children in nine communities.

But after giving evidence about Cloughley’s abuses at a preliminary inquiry, the woman was “mortified” at the prospect of having to testify once again, at his trial in Iqaluit.

So she flew to Yellowknife in a desperate attempt to find help. There, the RCMP picked her up when they found her wandering the streets late at night, intoxicated. While locked up inside the Yellowknife drunk tank, she used a piece of clothing to hang herself.

“There are numerous other examples of Inuit who committed suicide just before having to go to court…,” Rousseau goes on to say in his thesis.

This is compounded by the enormous stress produced by long delays between arrest, preliminary inquiry and trial, sometimes two to three years in serious cases, Rousseau says.

And the simple act of sitting in the witness box, in public, while commenting about the actions of another person, forces aboriginal witnesses “to behave in a manner that is entirely inappropriate for them.” Witnesses often suffer nightmares or get sick to the point of vomiting when it’s time for them to go to court.

This is made worse, sometimes, by hostile treatment and intimidation from the family and the community.

“In sexual abuse and family matters, often the victim is shunned by the community and may even be banished. This happens because the victim is perceived as turning against her community because she got the court system involved,” Rousseau writes.

Child victims of sexual abuse also suffer enormous damage simply by appearing in court, especially when they provide confusing answers to lawyer’s questions and the abuser is acquitted.

“Thus, in most cases, child witnesses come out of the experience re-victimized and, the accused being acquitted, they feel they have done something very wrong, since they think the judge or the jury did not believe them.”

But mishandled guilty verdicts may also produce shattered lives, Rousseau says.

The Puvirnituq woman to whom he dedicates his thesis was brutally raped in 1988 by a man from Sanikiluaq called Lucassie Eqidlak. There were no police officers in the community so Rousseau, who happened to be working with the local justice committee at the time, took the woman’s statement and arranged for the Quebec provincial police to send an officer to Puvirnituq to arrest the man.

Two years later, while working as a Crown prosecutor in Iqaluit, Rousseau discovered that the same man had gone on to rape two women in Sanikiluaq. A Quebec court had given him a suspended sentence, three year’s probation, and ordered him not to return to Puvirnituq.

“I was shocked to find out that the Quebec court had been so lenient with this man to the extent it seemed to be a travesty of justice.”

A Northwest Territories court sentenced Eqidlak to five years in jail for the Sanikiluaq rapes. But Rousseau points out that few Inuit have any faith in the correctional system, either.

He says that the Inuit victims he’s spoken to “often say they would be satisfied with anything that would prevent the assault from re-occurring,” such as treatment and counselling, and that they value incarceration only because it keeps the offender away for a period of time.

Though the Office of the Interim Commissioner and a Nunavut Social Development Council held a major symposium on justice issues in Rankin Inlet in 1998, the Nunavut government has done little work since then.

Nunavut’s unified court may have simplified the system by replacing two levels of court with one, and there are now more Inuit employees in the justice department, but Rousseau says this is just window-dressing.

“The fact that you have more Inuit employees, will that change the system? It may also happen that the system may co-opt those people,” he said.

A resolution of the cultural conflict that lies at the heart of the legal system’s dysfunctions cannot be done within the system, Rousseau says.

He says there are two possible responses: continued management of it, or a process aimed at resolving it, which includes restoring the power that aboriginal people once had to resolve disputes in their communities.

He favours a wide-ranging dialogue between Inuit and non-Inuit people sitting down together, outside the legal system. If no resolution is found, the “managed” conflict may go just on and on, Rousseau says.

“It may become intractable. It may become really hard to resolve.”