An urgent plea for support

This upcoming May will mark the 10th anniversary of my wife, Bela Kosoian, having been detained, handcuffed, and fined for not having held a subway escalator handrail in the Montréal subway system. She was also charged with obstruction of a police officer when she requested to know what law she had violated as a condition for giving her name.

Three years later, Bela contested the tickets and won her case in municipal court on the grounds the police did not have the legal authority to compel people to hold the handrail under threat of a fine.

Bela subsequently launched a civil lawsuit against the police and the transit commission for abuse of power. At the time of the incident they had affirmed there was a regulation that specifically required people to hold the handrail when this is factually untrue. No such regulation ever existed.

While the lower Quebec courts did not think my wife’s grievance had any merit, the Supreme Court of Canada has since accepted to hear her case.

When the original incident occurred, all we wanted was for an apology to be issued and for the charges against her to be dropped.

Instead the police did something that strikes at the very heart of our liberal democratic society – rather than withhold comment pending the completion of an investigation, they used their powers and resources as agents of the state to go after her and publicly assassinate her character. Outside the scope of any investigation, they engaged a public relations firm to work with police spokespersons to win back public confidence through omissions and disinformation. In short, the police took away Bela’s right to a presumption of innocence and gave themselves extrajudicial powers to stage a trial in the court of public opinion.

Unfortunately, recent case law has given too much power to police to infringe upon the rights of people in Canada. When it comes to knowing and adhering to the law, they are presently held to a lower standard of care and accountability than the general public in spite of having greater powers.

Numerous commissions of inquiry into abuses of police power have proven to be ineffective and largely symbolic.

The flagrant abuses of police powers during the Oka crisis, the Asia Pacific Economic Summit, the Toronto G20 Summit, the Montebello Summit, and the Maple Spring demonstrations – just to name a few -- all live on in infamy as examples of why Bela’s case needs to move forward in order to bring police powers back in line with our liberal democratic values.

This case will determine whether a police officer has the right to detain, arrest or penalize a person on the basis of an offense that does not exist and subsequently claim that he believed that it existed to avoid any civil liability.

It is therefore vitally important for the Supreme Court to consider what limits, if any, should be placed on the police's right to act in the absence of a civil or criminal offense.

In the days, weeks, and months ahead I am going to be producing a series of videos, each one dealing with a different facet of the case in order to raise awareness and solicit support for her challenge to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Going to court is an expensive and time consuming proposition. As private citizens the only means of financial support we have is to reach out to the greater public for assistance.

According to the timetable set by the Court, Bela's legal team will have to file a legal brief in early February 2019 while the other parties will have until the end of March 2019 to do the same. Also, the Supreme Court provides for the possibility for other organizations or entities to submit an application to intervene in the case. Subsequently, a hearing will be fixed by the Court.

For the better part of a decade we have been diligently fighting this injustice on our own, at our own expense, without any aid from the public.

Your contribution is absolutely crucial to this case.

We thank you very much for your consideration and help.