The CBA Military Law Section is pleased to announce that Amélie Gravel, a student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, is the winner of the 2016 Sword and Scale essay competition. The award was established by the Section to promote and reward interest in military law topics in Canadian law schools.
Amélie has worked in various areas of law such as discipline, ethics and criminal law. She currently specializes in the latter as part of her work with the Director of Criminal Prosecutions in Quebec. She began her Bachelor of Law degree at the Université du Québec à Montréal in January of this year.
Here is a summary of her winning paper, Victims of Military Infractions: Victims Like any Other (Les victimes d’infractions d’ordre militaire : des victimes comme les autres), only available in French:
[TRANSLATION] The Canadian Victims’ Bill of Rights, which gives greater voice to the rights of victims of crime throughout the criminal justice system, came into effect in 2015. This law does not apply, however, to military infractions. Bill C-71, an adaptation of this Bill of Rights to the particularities of the military justice system, seems to have fallen of the rails. Victims of military infractions are therefore deprived of the same rights granted to all other Canadian victims of crime. Important legislative changes over the past 34 years have helped to align the roles of the various actors in the military justice system with those of their counterparts in the criminal courts and eliminate some of the disparity between the two systems. The victim, however, still suffers from the disparities that remain.
Read the winning paper