The Supreme Court of Canada has sided with a woman who was handcuffed and fined for refusing to hold an escalator handrail in a public transit station.<\/p>\n
Bela Kosoian was arrested in 2009 and fined a total of C$420 ($316, \u00a3244).<\/p>\n
She was acquitted of the infractions, and sued the transit authority, the city where the station was located, and the arresting officer for C69,000.<\/p>\n
Two lower courts rejected her lawsuit, but on Friday the Supreme Court awarded her C$20,000.<\/p>\n
Ms Kosian had been taking the down escalator into the Montmorency Metro station in the city of Laval, Quebec, which is part of Montreal’s public transit system, when a police officer stopped her and told her to hold the handrail.<\/p>\n
Their exchange became heated when she refused, and refused to identify herself.<\/p>\n
The officer then searched her bag and handcuffed her, issuing her two tickets – a C$100 one for disobeying an illustrated sign instructing her to hold the handrail, and a C$320 one for obstructing the work of an inspector.<\/p>\n
In her subsequent lawsuit, Ms Kosian said she had experienced “significant psychological stress and humiliation” as a result of the arrest.<\/p>\n
But two courts rejected the suit, arguing she had been “the author of her own misfortune”.<\/p>\n
She fought the case all the way to Canada’s Supreme Court.<\/p>\n
The court ruled the officer had conducted an unlawful search based on a “non\u2011existent offence, namely disobeying the pictogram indicating that the handrail should be held”.<\/p>\n
It settled on C$20,000 damages to be split between the city, the transit authority and the officer. The amount had been proposed by a lower court judge, in a dissenting opinion, in one of the earlier court cases.<\/p>\n
“In a free and democratic society, no one should accept – or expect to be subjected to – unjustified state intrusions. Interference with freedom of movement, just like invasion of privacy, must not be trivialized,”\u00a0the court wrote in its decision.<\/a><\/p>\n Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"