Cameras and tape recorders were rolling in a Victoria courtroom yesterday as defence lawyers insisted that nine South Korean sailors accused of human smuggling were forced to take part.
Brad Hickford, the fifth and final defence counsel to wrap up his case, said the boat and crew were hijacked in the East China Sea by so-called snakeheads.
Captain Chong Un Kim, the skipper and the only one to testify, said these Chinese enforcers knew details of his own family and his crew, and their lives were threatened.
Mr. Hickford asked the jurors to place themselves in the crew's shoes.
"Think of what it must have been like to undergo the voyage and the circumstances of he and his crew's nightmare," Mr. Hickford said, a translator repeating his words in the background for the accused to understand.
The B.C. Supreme Court trial is the crew's second, he said.
"The first was the survival of the hijacking and voyage that he told you about."
The Koreans claim their boat was boarded by pirates who brought the migrants aboard and forced the crew to sail to Canada.
Prosecutor Peter La Prairie wrapped up his case by asking the jury to consider whether Mr. Kim's tale of hijacking is to be believed.
Mr. La Prairie said the captain failed to mention any weapons in sight during the voyage and failed to call for help once his ship was spotted by a Canadian Forces plane off the B.C. coast.
But defence lawyer Robert Farvoden, who represents a deckhand on the ship, told the jury to be skeptical about what the Crown witnesses had to say.
The trial is making legal history in B.C., where it is the first to allow media cameras and microphones to record proceedings.
Mr. Justice Ronald McKinnon agreed to allow recording on a limited basis, breaking a long-standing Canadian practice against electronic media in courts. There are no specific laws banning electronics and cameras, but it has long been the norm in Canadian courtrooms to forbid them.
Television cameras are allowed at the Supreme Court of Canada and at public inquiries and many quasi-judicial procedures across Canada. Cameras have been allowed into courtrooms on occasion in Ontario, Newfoundland and Alberta. The issue has been argued on a case-by-case basis.
Lawyers for the prosecution and defence both opposed the media application, citing concerns ranging from safety of the accused if the proceedings are televised nationally, to questioning the timing of the application.
Television cameras were allowed at a B.C. Supreme Court civil trial eight years ago, but only when a jury was taken out of the courtroom to view railroad tracks where an accident had taken place.
The cameras inside Courtroom 302 can film only the judge and lawyers. The accused, the jury and the Korean translator are not to be filmed or recorded.
The men were charged after a boat carrying 131 Chinese migrants arrived off the B.C. coast last summer.
The migrants were dropped on a rocky shore in the Queen Charlotte Islands on Aug. 11.
It was the second of four dilapidated ships that, between them, brought almost 600 migrants to B.C.
The nine Koreans have been jailed since their arrest in the summer of 1999.