Stephen Vasciannie

LAST WEEK, the Common-wealth Secretariat organised a seminar on the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) in Kingston. The main purpose of the seminar was to promote the spread of information about the CCJ to various senior officials from court systems in various Commonwealth jurisdictions.

Thus, the seminar included among its participants judges, senior court administrators, and other represen-tatives from countries such as Nigeria, New Zealand, Uganda, Kenya, Canada and Australia. On the Jamaican side, various persons from both the public and private sector met with the participants, and in some cases, made presentations on different aspects of the CCJ.

In the debate on the establishment of the CCJ in the Caribbean, and especially in Jamaica, most of the traffic has concentrated on the fact that the CCJ is designed to replace appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. As part of this debate, the Privy Council has itself found that the parliamentary measures taken by the Jamaican Government to set up the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ were not compatible with the Constitution. Hence, the legislation in Jamaica was found to be null and void.

Academy Awards

The debate has, of course, had several components, and the list of points for and against the CCJ reminds me of a kind of 'Academy Awards for Best Argument'. Those supportive of the CCJ have been apt to emphasise some or all of the following points:

The Privy Council is a colonial court, reliance on which is incompatible with modern notions of sovereignty, independence and self-determination.

The Privy Council is a remote court, located in the former colonial metropole, with judges largely unfamiliar with the social, economic and political realities of the Caribbean.

Because the Privy Council is far away, it is costly to pursue appeals to that court, with the result that it is hardly ever used by litigants in some Caribbean countries, and only occasionally used by others. And because of this limited use, the final court for the Caribbean has only limited opportunities to develop several areas of the law in the region.

The CCJ will help to promote Caribbean jurisprudence not only because judges here will be more familiar with local conditions, but also because they will decide a more substantial range of matters, and many more cases than the Privy Council would.

Opposition

Persons opposed to the CCJ, or at least those supporting retention of appeals to the Privy Council, have their own list of arguments. They argue that, among other things, the Privy Council should be retained because:

The Privy Council is a court with judges of the highest calibre, well-schooled in the law, open-minded, and willing to be convinced only by pertinent legal considerations.

This first-rate court is free of cost to Caribbean governments and nationals. Where quality freeness exists, poor countries should be slow to resist.

The CCJ is a costly operation. The money that has been spent on establishing the CCJ should be, or should have been, spent on fixing up local courts, and in particular, courts in the RM jurisdiction, some of which are simply embarrassing.

It has not properly been established that the British authorities want appeals to the Privy Council to end. Indeed, the fact that the Privy Council has been prepared to travel to The Bahamas (in December 2006) to hear cases in the region is a sign that their Lordships want Caribbean appeals to continue.