sentenced to seven years in prison<\/a> in January and removed from the Winnipeg Police Service after he admitted to a long list of crimes involving corruption and selling drugs.<\/p>\nCourt of King’s Bench Justice Jeffrey Harris rescinded the publication ban in Hoque’s case in a Winnipeg courtroom on Thursday, after CBC News challenged it in court.<\/p>\n
Harris said while he granted the ban when Hoque’s lawyer requested it in April based on a suggestion that Hoque’s safety would be in danger, the judge agreed with CBC’s position that it was done incorrectly.<\/p>\n
“The press was not given notice of the application, and that’s a procedural defect. And I’m not prepared to continue a procedurally defective order until Mr. Hoque decides to come to court,” Harris said.<\/p>\n
Harris said Hoque, who refused transportation to the scheduled publication ban hearing, could bring a proper application to try to get a new publication ban if he wanted to \u2014 but in the meantime, the judge set aside the ban.<\/p>\n
Hoque’s lawyer William Marks, who had not provided evidence to show Hoque’s safety would be in jeopardy without a ban, asked for an adjournment to give him more time to prepare a response or get Hoque to court to testify. In response, Harris said Hoque had had “ample time” to respond after a motion and accompanying affidavit were filed in April.<\/p>\n
“Yeah, but there’s incorrect information in there, so I wanted to see if they were going to add to that,” Marks said.<\/p>\n
CBC lawyer Carter Liebzeit said that was the “first I’m hearing of this.”<\/p>\n
He also countered Hoque’s argument that publishing his name would put him in danger behind bars.<\/p>\n
“This mere assertion of grave physical harm is not enough of a serious risk to warrant a publication ban,” Liebzeit said, citing Supreme Court of Canada case law.<\/p>\n
“Otherwise, any time a defence counsel stood up and said ‘serious risk,’ then we’re talking about restrictions on CBC’s Charter rights. So there does have to be some sort of evidence.”<\/p>\n
Marks told Justice Harris he felt the court made the decision to remove the ban “well knowing that [Hoque] might be harmed, possibly killed.”<\/p>\n
“This court is saying rather than that, procedural fairness is more important than his safety,” Marks said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t have any evidence on that,” Harris replied.<\/p>\n
Marks responded that there have been such stories in the news.<\/p>\n
“Have you read how many articles [there are] of people that have been killed in jail? Hurt in jail? This court has seen, I’m sure, sentencings of that,” Marks said. “This is not a trite issue that we’re just dealing with. This is someone’s safety.”<\/p>\n
The publication ban had covered details including Hoque’s identity, that he is in custody and that he’s originally from Bangladesh.<\/p>\n
It also covered the names of other people who testified or were mentioned during the hearing to withdraw his guilty pleas, except for Bostock. That list included the names of his former lawyers \u2014 one of whom, Saul Simmonds, has testified that Hoque never told him anything about Bostock threatening him at gunpoint<\/a>.<\/p>\nHoque previously told court he came to Canada as an international student and ended up becoming addicted to gambling and owing money to drug traffickers, who forced him to work for them.<\/p>\n
An agreed statement of facts read in court when he entered his pleas said he sold drugs to an undercover officer several times before being arrested in 2023. He was arrested on new drug charges last year, a day after pleading guilty in the first case.<\/p>\n
Hoque’s hearing to try to withdraw his guilty pleas is expected to continue at a later date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A judge has removed a publication ban on the identity of an admitted drug trafficker who alleged he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[36810,15006,32462,36808,36807,1768,36809,84,9891],"class_list":["post-101661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-drug-trafficker","tag-elston-bostock","tag-guilty-pleas","tag-jeffrey-harris","tag-mohammad-riyadul-hoque","tag-publication-ban","tag-william-marks","tag-winnipeg","tag-winnipeg-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}