TIMELY INTERVENTION ON CCJ
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
October 19, 2003
IT IS more than ironical that a British law Lord should be pleading with Caribbean Community states to get rid of the jurisdiction of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London in preference for our own regional court of last resort, namely the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).
But the personal position of law Lord Leonard Hoffman, as articulated in an address he delivered at the recent annual dinner of the Trinidad and Tobago Law Association, would certainly be viewed as yet another positive contribution to the arrangements currently in train for the inauguration of the CCJ.
It has not gone unnoticed that the Law Association, whose special guest Hoffman was at the October 10 dinner event, was itself involved in a controversy over the propriety of the Chief Justice of Trinidad and Tobago, Satnarine Sharma administering the oath to members of the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission when they held their inaugural meeting in Port-of-Spain in August.
Exactly why the scheduled November 15 official launch of the CCJ in Port-of-Spain, where it is to have its operational headquarters, has been postponed, has not been satisfactorily explained.
But the hope is that all hiccups would be removed for this regional court to come on stream. It is being created to serve the needs of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), with original jurisdiction, as well as being the final appellate court for those CARICOM states that would have severed ties with the Privy Council.
We have long passed the stage where the initial efforts to establish the CCJ were greeted by opponents, among them politicians and members of the region's legal profession, with skepticism and dismissed as a "hangman's court", on the contention that it would be anxious to implement the death penalty for murder.
Benefits of final court
Those who had adopted such a narrow and self-serving position, would also have demonstrated in the process their own prejudices and contempt for the fine legal minds across the Caribbean Community whose competence and integrity, if properly mobilised, could only enhance the cause of justice and enable the growth of a system of Caribbean jurisprudence.
Lord Hoffman was quite clear in his address to the Trinidad and Tobago Law Association.
"Speaking personally", he said, "a court of your own is necessary if you are going to have the full benefit of what a final court can do to transform society in partnership with the other two branches of government..." (the Executive and Parliament).
As the British law Lord sees it, the ability of a final court - and this also applies to the CCJ - to function as a third branch of government, depended not only upon its "legitimacy" but upon the "sensitivity" of its members to what was both necessary and possible.
Detractors of the CCJ may find other arguments, but those in favour would readily concur with Lord Hoffman's position in support of the CCJ.
Even those who contend that it would be cheaper to have access to the CCJ, with savings in air fares, or the symbolism of rulings on a single issue, nevertheless, in Hoffman's perspective, trivialise the importance of the Caribbean Community having a final court of its own as an "integral part" of how independent states are governed.
It was an appropriate and timely intervention by the British law Lord on an issue of great national/regional significance.