Justice Services affirms changes

As of this Monday, a new mandate has been approved for Justice Services in the community. 

“This was more an updating of the mandate to reflect current practices and realities,” said Kevin Fleischer, commissioner at Justice Services. “Things evolve over time, and the mandate had to reflect that.”

The mandate has been reworded to emphasize that Justice Services is now under the oversight of the Kahnawake Justice Commission, rather than the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake (MCK), as was the case before, he said. Other modifications revolve around redefining how Kahnawake’s justice system is administered, he said.

“We’re using a more expansive description of what we mean by the administration of the Kahnawake justice system,” Fleischer said. “In this new mandate, we are considering administration of the justice system to include the development and management of fair, impartial, independent and accessible justice forms that integrate traditional Kanien’kehá:ka values. That’s a much wider definition than what we had been using before.”

The council table approved the updated mandate for Justice Services at a meeting held earlier this week. 

While at that meeting, the Council of Chiefs also approved a request to omit “strategic direction” from the mandate of its chiefs on the justice portfolio. This will remove the MCK’s responsibility of overseeing and directing the operation of Justice Services, a role that will now be taken on by the Kahnawake Justice Commission instead. 

“The justice portfolio team, they deal with more internal and external political matters. One of its roles was also to provide overall strategic direction to Justice Services. That element has been taken out of the justice portfolio team mandate,” Fleischer said. “Strategic direction will be coming from Justice Commission members, of which we have community members sitting there.”

This will provide more distance between the Council of Chiefs and Justice Services, so it can run without being influenced by elected leaders.

“We’re running things like courts, alternative dispute resolution and restorative justice, things that need to run in an independent, fair and impartial manner,” Fleischer said. “In certain areas, we have a certain degree of autonomy. Thus, instead of falling under Council, we now fall under the Justice Commission, in terms of oversight and monitoring.”

Tonya Perron, the Council chief on the justice portfolio, said both she and Council chief Ryan Montour pushed creating more distance between Justice Services and the council table. The table up to now has only played an advisory political role in the oversight of Justice Services, she added, never meddling in the “everyday administration of justice” in the community.

“The portfolio teams, not only for justice, but for all of them, are never supposed to provide actual direction. We don’t give orders,” she said.

“Everything else has remained the same,” she said about the justice portfolio team’s mandate. “The portfolio is responsible for public policy, political strategies, and political issues that arise. We’re still responsible for supporting everything in Justice Services, ensuring that it has all the resources and the budget.”

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