B.C. Supreme Court Justice Douglas Thompson found a failure to find a competent interpreter led to ‘an embarrassing collapse of ability of the courts to adjudicate’ in the case of an accused drug trafficker.
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has stayed charges against an accused drug trafficker because the Ministry of Justice’s repeated failure to find a competent Cambodian interpreter.
Justice Douglas Thompson called Rong Kong Thim’s two-year legal language odyssey “one of those clearest of cases where the integrity of the judicial system is best protected by a stay of proceedings.”