Translating the printemps érable

Lisa-Marie Gervais               November 1, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.ledevoir.com/societe/justice/362919/gabriel-nadeau-dubois-a-ete-reconnu-coupable-d-outrage-au-tribunal

Gabriel Nadeau Dubois, militant student activist, has been found guilty Thursday of contempt of court.  The student in question let it be known on twitter that he would not make comment before Friday.

According to his press secretary, Renaud Poirier St-Pierre, Mr. Nadeau-Dubois will meet with his lawyer Friday morning and a meeting with media will follow.  The question is whether there will be an appeal.

Nadeau Dubois who was a co-spokesperson for the Broader Coalition for Student Union Solidarity (CLASSE) will find out what his sentence is on November 9, 2012.

The prosecution had alleged that in an interview with the Réseau de l’Information  (Radio Canada news network)  last May, the ex-student-leader had incited his peers to defy the injunction forbidding picket lines, obtained by Jean-Francois Morasse, a student at Laval University who wanted to return to class.

Morasse’s lawyer has maintained that Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois had, of course, known about the injunction when he’d incited students to not respect the order.

For his part, Nadeau-Dubois’s lawyer, Me Giuseppe Sciortino, had pleaded ignorance, maintaining that nothing proved without a shadow of a doubt that his client had well and truly known about the injunction.

Nadeau-Dubois is eligible for a maximum penalty of a year in jail. Community Service or a fine are also possible.

Mixed Reactions

For its part, the Association for Student Union Solidarity (ASSÉ) has deplored the decision of the Superior Court to find its ex-spokesperson guilty of contempt of court.

“His conviction bears witness to the unacceptable criminalization of a political conflict.  In this sense, we hope to demonstrate our solidarity and will continue to defend his cause,” said Jérémie Bédard-Wien, spokesperson for ASSÉ, in a communiqué. Its organization, in collaboration with Nadeau-Dubois, will look for available options, including an appeal.

On the political side, Québec Solidaire has firmly condemned Judge Denis Jacques’s decision.  According to the MPP from Mercier, Amir Khadir, Nadeau-Dubois should have been subjected to a political trial.  “This decision by the court is an insult to all the youth that mobilized last spring, mostly peacefully.  Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois embodies this youth and has now been punished for having put himself at the service of a cause,” he said.

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Translated from the original French by Translating the printemps érable.

*Translating the printemps érable is a volunteer collective attempting to balance the English media’s extremely poor coverage of the student conflict in Québec by translating media that has been published in French into English. These are amateur translations; we have done our best to translate these pieces fairly and coherently, but the final texts may still leave something to be desired. If you find any important errors in any of these texts, we would be very grateful if you would share them with us at translatingtheprintempsderable@gmail.com. Please read and distribute these texts in the spirit in which they were intended; that of solidarity and the sharing of information.