Canada: Oblate missionary priest convicted across three proceedings (1990, 2015, 2025) of sexually abusing Inuit children in his own parishes

Proceedings

1. 1989-12-19 · guilty plea and sentence

   Northwest Territories Supreme Court (Baker Lake offences). Dejaeger pleaded guilty to eight counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault against children in Baker Lake, committed between 1982 and 1989, and was sentenced in early 1990 to five years in prison; he was released in 1991. A year later he was separately sentenced to eight months on two further sexual assault counts.

2. 2015-02-09 · conviction after trial and sentencing

   Nunavut Court of Justice, Iqaluit (Igloolik offences). Following his 2011 deportation from Belgium and a trial on charges dating to his time as a priest in Igloolik between 1978 and 1982, Dejaeger was convicted on 32 counts of sexual offences — including indecent assault, sexual assault, unlawful confinement and bestiality — against 23 Inuit victims, and sentenced to 19 years in prison (later reduced with credit for time served); a concurrent sentence was separately imposed the same year for historical sexual offences in Alberta. His appeal against the Igloolik conviction and sentence was dismissed by the Nunavut Court of Appeal in November 2018.

3. 2025-01-30 · guilty plea and sentence

   Nunavut Court of Justice, Iqaluit (further Igloolik offences). Dejaeger pleaded guilty to seven further counts of indecent assault against seven children in Igloolik, aged four to nine at the time, and was sentenced to six additional years in prison — the third distinct proceeding to convict him of sexually abusing children in the two Nunavut communities where he served as priest.

Appellate history

1. 2018-11-27

   Dismissed Dejaeger's appeal against his 2015 Igloolik conviction and 19-year sentence.

Documented coercion mechanisms

• sole or primary Catholic clergy presence in small, geographically isolated Inuit hamlets, giving unsupervised access to parish children
• explicit religious threats used to silence victims — telling children they would go to hell, or that Jesus would not accept them, if they told anyone what he had done
• exploitation of family trust in the parish priest as a figure of unquestioned moral and spiritual standing in the community
• flight to Belgium in 1995 after being charged over the Igloolik offences, delaying justice by roughly sixteen years until his 2011 deportation back to Canada