Délibérations judiciaires, confidentialité et intérêt public

Une réplique

Robert J. Sharpe et Kent Roach

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Dans son article « Délibérations judiciaires, confidentialité et intérêt public" »(15 janvier 2004), Alain-Robert Nadeau met en question notre décision de citer dans Brian Dickson: A Judge's Journey, la documentation déposée aux Archives nationales du Canada par l'ancien juge en chef. M^e Nadeau cite un extrait de notre livre qui donne les arguments contre la divulgation de la documentation afférente au processus décisionnel. Toutefois, il ne fait aucune référence aux arguments contraires. Nous ajoutons ici l'extrait de notre livre qui explique pourquoi nous avons décidé de citer les documents déposés par Brian Dickson.

Confidentiality is rarely, if ever, absolute. ...Confidentiality yields at the point where the interests protected by secrecy are outweighed by the public's right to know. As time passes, matters that required the protection of confidentiality have passed into history. The interest of confidentiality wanes and the public right to know prevails. [Même quand il s'agit du « principe sacré » de la confidentialité des délibérations du cabinet cité par M^e Nadeau: voir AG. v. Jonathan Cape Ltd. [1976] Q.B. 752.]

We accept that, for current cases and for sitting judges, the public interest is best served by protecting out-of-court judicial deliberations from the glare of public scrutiny. However, a rule of perpetual confidentiality is not required to protect the integrity of the judicial process. [...] In certain circumstances, the confidentiality surrounding judicial deliberations yields to the public interest in knowing the history of one of Canada's most important public institutions and the journey of one of our most notable judges.

We have[...] operated under several significant constraints that, in our view, eliminate any risk of harm to the important interests protected by the confidentiality of out-of-court judicial discussions. Dickson himself imposed the first constraint. ...Dickson carefully vetted every file and removed any material that he thought should not be dis-closed [...]

We ourselves have added certain qualifications. [...] Dickson retired from the Court in 1990 and this book appears more than a decade later in 2003. The judicial exchanges disclosed here took place between thirteen and thirty years ago. Simply put, the events we describe have passed from the realm of current events to the realm of history. The need to protect them from public scrutiny has waned and the interest of compiling an accurate historical record prevails.

A second and related qualification concerns the interests of the individual judges who participated in the deliberations we describe. [...] We have decided that we should not disclose anything revealed by Dickson's Papers of the deliberations of a still sitting judge. ... Subject to these constraints, we believe that it was appropriate for us to make full use of the out-of-court judicial deliberations revealed by Dickson's case files. As will be seen from the pages that follow, these discussions do not discredit the Court or any judge, nor could there be any serious thought that their disclosure will inhibit judicial deliberations in the future. To the contrary, they reveal a group of dedicated and hard working judges attempting to decide cases according to law and to the best of their ability.

 

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