Bibliographic record
Abstract
In R. v. Khawaja, the Supreme Court of Canada rejected a number of constitutional challenges to the terrorism offences in the Criminal Code. This paper focuses on the claim that the “participating or contributing” offence in section 83.18 was contrary to the principles of fundamental justice because it was overbroad or grossly disproportionate. The Court held that the purpose of the offence was to facilitate the prosecution and prevention of terrorism, without punishing conduct that was “innocent, socially useful or casual” or performed for a “valid reason”. In light of this purpose, the Court interpreted both the mens rea and the actus reus of the offence narrowly. As stated in the statute, the mens rea required proof not just of knowledge but also of a purpose to enhance the ability of a terrorist group to carry out its activity; but in some tension with the wording of the statute, the actus reus required proof of participation or contribution that is material or beyond de minimis. With this interpretation in hand, the Court readily rejected the claim that the offence was overbroad. The Court also rejected the disproportionality claim, in effect refusing to constitutionalize a norm against remoteness in the definition of criminal offences. This response to the section 7 claims in Khawaja illustrates two trends in recent Charter jurisprudence: The Court’s willingness to interpret statutes, rather than striking the m down, so as to control the scope of criminal liability, and the Court’s reluctance to recognize new principles of fundamental justice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".