With the FIFA World Cup now half a year away, one unexpected place will be impacted.
No criminal trials or civil jury trials will be able to take place between June 12 and July 8.
With hundreds of thousands of visitors expected to visit Vancouver for the games, the City will heavily draw on police services — including those that usually support court services — for public safety, traffic, and crowd management.
The BC Sheriff Service “may have difficulty providing its usual level of support for court operations,” according to an announcement last year from the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
The Sheriff Service usually transports accused people to custody, helps manage the jury and provides courthouse security.
They won’t have the same capacity to do these tasks, and all criminal jury trials and judge-alone criminal proceedings scheduled to begin or continue during the FIFA period need to be rescheduled.
People with criminal proceedings with an assigned judge can fill out a “request to appear,” where they can schedule a case management conference with the judge to reschedule the case.
The Court also expects that it will be hard to book hotel rooms during this time for deliberating juries or for out-of-town witnesses.
This means that no civil jury trials will proceed during the FIFA period, either. People who have filed a jury notice for a civil trial can convert it to a non-jury trial and keep their scheduled dates.
However, the Court might have to reduce the number of non-jury civil trials as FIFA gets closer.
“The full extent of the impacts is uncertain and will remain so for some time,” notes an announcement from the Supreme Court of British Columbia.
A spokesperson from the Supreme Court of British Columbia told Daily Hive that the Court “continues to monitor the situation, according to the information given to the Court by those responsible for the planning, and the Court may adjust as time goes on.”