VANCOUVER—Lawyers who won a landmark B.C. Supreme Court case ordering Canada to stop throwing federal inmates into solitary confinement for non-disciplinary reasons called on Ottawa to drop its appeal of the decision on Monday.

But as Ottawa continues its attempt to have the B.C. Court of Appeals overturn that January 2018 decision, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association said it remains confident the province’s highest court will side with the earlier ruling that administrative solitary confinement is unconstitutional, discriminatory against Indigenous people, and will order a change to the federal law.

“We’re continuing to fight it all the way,” said BCCLA litigation counsel Jay Aubrey at a press conference after the appeals court granted Ottawa an extension to June. “We’re hopeful to get a great decision … But absolutely we’re hopeful the Attorney General will drop the appeal.

“Human beings need meaningful human contact. (Solitary confinement) causes severe psychological distress, creates mental illness, and in some cases causes death.”

But the federal government says current legislation before Parliament addresses the constitutional concerns raised by the courts in both B.C. and in Ontario, which separately ordered changes to solitary practices.

In court last November, Crown lawyer Mitchell Taylor acknowledged that even if Correction Services Canada had interpreted federal administrative segregation laws unconstitutionally, it does not follow that those laws themselves must be tossed out.

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One in four federal inmates have been put into solitary confinement at some point, some spending years in a cell the size of a bathroom. Court documents show there were 14,000 inmates in federal prisons in the 2016-2017 fiscal year, and the percentage of segregated Indigenous inmates increased by 31 per cent between 2005 and 2015, whereas segregated non-Indigenous inmates grew by only 2 per cent.

The appeal court may have extended the deadline, but it ordered the federal government to immediately address key rights violations.

“While we are prepared to extend the suspension of the declaration of constitutional invalidity,” the court ruled Monday, “that cannot be a justification for the federal government to maintain unchanged the conditions of inmates kept in administrative segregation.”

The BCCLA said it had hoped Monday’s ruling would be the appeal court’s final judgment in their quest to end what’s known in corrections as “administrative segregation.”

Regardless of the outcome of the appeal, the federal government must still meet a Jan. 18 deadline set by the Supreme Court for a number of immediate fixes, including improvements in detainee health care, informing inmates of their right to access legal counsel while in solitary, and a half-hour more time outside every day.

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Another order, to allow Indigenous elders access to inmates, must be fulfilled by May, BCCLA lawyer Kate Oja explained.

“The practice of solitary confinement violations inmates’ rights in federal prison,” she said. “We have every bit of faith the government will comply with the orders.”

With files from Wanyee Li

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