THE Government of British Columbia announced on Tuesday that it has appointed three new judges and a new judicial justice to the Provincial Court to support timely and efficient access to justice.
The new judges are:
* Aamna Afsar (effective May 1)
* Christopher Balison (effective May 1); and
* Dennis Isaac Ferbey (effective May 1)
The new judicial justice appointed to the Provincial Court is Patrick Angly.
The Ministry of Attorney General said that Afsar joined the BC Prosecution Service (BCPS) in 2006 and worked as Crown counsel in Vancouver for almost 14 years. During that time, Afsar spent several years working in the Downtown Community Court.
In 2019, Afsar became a member of the Immigration Refugee Board (IRB) of Canada. In 2020, Afsar received the IRB’s Chairperson’s Award for developing curriculum and training for the gender-related task force to improve the adjudication of gender-related refugee claims. Since 2021, Afsar has been an alternate chair of the BC Review Board. Afsar was appointed a judicial justice in July 2022 and is qualified to conduct hearings in French.
From 2007 to 2023, Afsar was a member and treasurer of the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, where one of Afsar’s significant contributions was facilitating workshops for community members on Canadian family law and domestic-violence awareness and prevention.
According to the B.C. Provincial Court website, Afsar is the daughter of immigrants from Pakistan who met as students at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Her father, a civil engineer and urban planner, grew up in a remote Pakistani village. Her mother was unable to study engineering in Pakistan because she was a woman. Instead, she obtained a master’s degree in nuclear physics while working to change the gender-based admission requirements for engineering so other women could enter that field.
The family settled in Saskatchewan where Afsar learned from her parents to value education and public service. She obtained an honours degree in psychology and biology at the University of Regina and a dual civil and common law degree from McGill University in Montreal.
After articling and practising law briefly in Alberta, she moved to BC and worked for the BC Prosecution Service for 13 years. As Crown Counsel, her work ranged from charge approval and bail hearings to sexual assault and murder trials. She also spent time in the Downtown Community Court and Youth Court.
In 2019, Judicial Justice Afsar became an adjudicator on the Immigration and Refugee Board. As a member of the Board’s Gender Related Task Force, she developed training on trauma-informed practice and became a founding member of the Refugee Protection Division’s Quality Centre, whose mandate was to ensure excellence in decision making.
In 2021, she was appointed an alternate chair of the British Columbia Review Board, the tribunal responsible for making decisions about people accused of crimes who have been found unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible due to a mental disorder.
Afsar has also been an active volunteer with organizations including the Canadian Bar Association’s mentorship program, the UBC Criminal Law Clinic, the Indigenous Community Legal Clinic and the Justice Education Society. She is bilingual, speaking English and French.
