Cecil GutzmoreIF THE Caribbean people have to rely on the British-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Privy Council) or any other external body to preserve our liberties and human rights we are in serious trouble. These values must be guaranteed in the quality of our institutional arrangements and through the national struggles we conduct to preserve and enhance them.
Britain had neither inkling nor intent that almost forty years after her formal departure from her main Caribbean colonies these nation-states would still be making free with the Privy Council. Britain has been called "perfidious Albion". She has long practised the same "necessary" deception now detectable in her approach to ending the Caribbean's access to the Privy Council. British official policy is that we can stay as long as we like and will certainly not be "kicked out". This runs concurrently with clear British "indications" that it is time for the Caribbean to go and with British/European Union provision of assistance to that end. Those who idealise and/or misunderstand United Kingdom governance wrongly hear only a lie in the claim by Caribbean politicians to have received these British indications. Politicians who speak of not wishing to be "caught on colonial property after closing time" are wrongly disparaged.
The CARICOM territories have a double need for a Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). First, to exercise, under certain protocols of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, an original jurisdiction in disputes between signatories. Secondly, to serve as the long overdue replacement for the British-based Privy Council. There are non-negotiable requirements for the CCJ. It must have a Bench open to the best regional and international legal talent. Its processes of appointment and termination must be well insulated from the vagaries of politics, while as far as possible expressing elements of the popular will. It must be securely funded, with member states at the outset absolutely forbidding themselves the option of withholding its money on any pretext. It must be accessible in several senses of that word. Finally, the CCJ must be constitutionally deeply entrenched in all member states at the point of establishment. All Caribbean people should support such a Court.
I have neither heard nor read any valid arguments against this essential regional institution. On display, rather, are somewhat shameless struts along the low road towards a less than ideal CCJ. Thus, CARICOM Heads of Government have soiled the CCJ with their illiberal motives in going for the CCJ now, including speeded up hanging and cheap, oppressive homophobia.
What but suspicion can arise when a Jamaican Government simultaneously moves to depart the Privy Council and to withdraw from the Latin America-Caribbean UN forum on Human Rights? Especially when the latter is a commitment the Jamaican Government once proudly, voluntarily undertook after independence. It shames itself and disturbs its citizens and worries our friends abroad by seeking to reside therefrom.
The Attorney-General of Jamaica speaks of "metropolitan standards of human rights" as inappropriate for the people of the same Caribbean that C.L.R. James rightly recognised as having achieved modernity before Britain. Does he know that our enslaved and Maroon ancestors struggled for far higher concepts of freedom and human rights than the individualist, property-based and racist model in vogue in the colonising metropoles.
Why have the Bar Associations of the Caribbean failed to keep their eyes exclusively on the prize of a CCJ of which we can all be proud? Some give the impression of being confused by island politics. What deeper reasons than the antics of the transient Basdeo Panday regime explain the fact that the Trinidad and Tobago Bar Association is presently in outright opposition to the CCJ? How can leading members of Jamaica's Bar Association be using the present deplorable state of Jamaica's courts as an argument for not establishing the Caribbean Court? They want to wait till next never, while declaring themselves supporters of the court in abstract principle.
Mr Patterson may have at last found the formula that will confound those demanding that he put his Government at risk by immediately holding a referendum on the double issue of leaving the Privy Council and the Creation of the CCJ. These matters, he now says, will and should be settled by general election. There has never been a snowball in hell's chance that any Jamaican PNP Prime Minister would again expose his administration in a constitutionally unnecessary Referendum. Certainly not one contested by the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) effectively joined by other opposition forces. Millard Johnson's new PPP and some of my misguided Rastafari brethren, led by the late Ras Sam Brown, have not been given sufficient credit for their powerful part in the 1961 anti-Federation campaign.
I have neither heard nor read any remarks addressing the irresponsibly low road taken on this matter by the JLP (and the NDM?). Mr Seaga is still fighting that old anti-Caribbean integration battle. A little while ago I heard him condemning another desirable regional development as "creeping federation". While in office he expressed minimal reservation to our CARICOM partners about the Caribbean Court. Has he established with the British that if Jamaica leaves the Privy Council, Her Majesty's United Kingdom Government would entertain the considerable expense of Jamaica's return thereto, bringing all those costly capital punishment cases that the British now so deeply resent? Nor have I heard a word from Mr Seaga about his alternative in the event that the British say "no" to a Jamaican return.
The reason Mr Seaga has not been criticised is that too many of those commenting on these matters share his self-regarding Jamaican 'big island' disrespect for our Caribbean partners and for advancing the process of Caribbean integration. To them, it is perfectly acceptable to negotiate for decades within CARICOM on one basis and then to switch at the last moment as we did in 1961. Some are with Mr Seaga also in not minding forever genuflecting before a Privy Council that he dubiously says is "the best court in the world." Others are with him in their loathing of the PNP. They hope that a Referendum defeat will help to sweep out the PNP, giving Mr Seaga a final go at the fleshpots. Is he really the better that must come?
Cecil Gutzmore is a research student and lecturer at UWI, Mona.
