The significance of the inauguration of the Caribbean Court
of Justice, which takes place in Port-of-Spain this Saturday,
should not be lost on the people of the region.
For a few countries it will mark the immediate establishment
of a fully functioning CCJ, in its original and appellate
jurisdictions; for the rest of Caricom, this may come to
pass in the not too distant future.
In T&T, for instance, at least for the time being the
court will have only an original jurisdiction, over matters
related to Caricom; for it to become the final court of
appeal in place of the Privy Council requires a special
parliamentary majority.
The court will be a statement that the formerly colonised
people of the English-speaking Caribbean—and Dutch
Suriname—have sufficiently grown in confidence to allow
their own jurists to make final judgments for them without
recourse to the British Privy Council on legal issues.
One source of the contentions against the CCJ is political.
In Jamaica, the opposition Jamaica Labour Party has been
consistent in having problems with any notion of that country
being integrated into the Caribbean family of nations. It
was this party’s philosophy which led to the break-up
of the West Indian Federation and the slow-down of the process
of integration.
However, the JLP’s new leader, who has raised serious
legal concerns about the organisational structure of the
CCJ, now seems prepared to work with the governing People’s
National Party, the party of the integrationist Norman Manley,
to revisit aspects of how the CCJ will be enshrined in the
Jamaican Constitution.
But fear and its attendant questioning of the CCJ still
exist, despite the evidence that, certainly in this country,
over 90 per cent of matters are settled by the local courts
and only a small percentage of those that reach the British
court are overturned.
In this latter instance, the only antidote would be the
successful operation of the CCJ in the future. The region
is fortunate to have as the first president of the CCJ retired
T&T Chief Justice Michael de la Bastide, who not only
served with distinction at the bench, but had a career as
an outstanding attorney, being named Queen’s Counsel.
With Mr de la Bastide on the bench of the CCJ are learned
and experienced jurists from throughout the Carib-bean,
who, with the structure of the court being established on
a sound basis, could withstand quite an amount of manhandling
by politicians. Moreover, the tenets of the CCJ specifically
prohibit judges from taking instructions from anyone, including
politicians.
A further pillar of the independence of the CCJ is its US$100
million fund, administered by the Caribbean Development
Bank. It has been described by the president of the CDB,
Prof Compton Bourne, as funding in perpetuity.
That structure must certainly ensure that the court is not
held prisoner by any national government or indeed combination
of them. It is, indeed, a financial future far more secure
than that of any of the national courts in the region.
