The failures of CARICOM have become so notorious that talking about them incites more contemptuous laughter than lawyer jokes. And there’s probably no greater monument to these failures than the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), which was established in 2001 to replace the Privy Council as our final court of appeal.
Establishing the CCJ codified the natural desire of CARICOM’s newly independent member states to cut the final umbilical cord of British colonialism.
Therefore, it is stupefying that only two of them, namely Barbados and Guyana, have actually severed this cord and embraced the untethered independence that they all yearned for so proudly. Indeed, given that enlightened Jamaicans proposed this liberating cut as early as 1970, the fact that even they have not followed through reflects an habitual suckling on the colonial tit that is as judicially infantile as it is politically hypocritical.
It’s no wonder we now face the humiliating spectacle of Lord Nicholas Phillips, president of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, giving us, in effect, a public spanking for failing to assume ultimate responsibility for our own judicial affairs.
Specifically, in an interview published in the September 20, 2009, edition of The Financial Times, Lord Phillips complained that the five British judges who sit on the Privy Council spend 40 percent of their time adjudicating cases from the former colonies. He indicated – with forlorn hope – that he wished these now-independent countries
would stop using the Privy Council and set up their own final courts of appeal instead.
You’d think Lord Phillips’s admonition would chasten any self-respecting Caribbean leader. And, that this in turn would compel that leader to relieve Britain of this ‘white man’s burden,’ which is plainly anachronistic, untenable, and unfair. Not to mention that Lord Phillips is only admonishing Caribbean leaders to do what they have known for nearly 40 years they should, indeed must, do.
Yet I fear it will take far more than paternal rebukes to get our leaders to do the right thing. Nothing demonstrates this quite like the clueless and hopelessly solicitous reaction of the deputy prime minister and attorney general of The Bahamas, Hon. Brent Symonette:
It may be that one course of action may be to limit the (number of) appeals from the Court of Appeal to the Privy Council – that might be an alternative.
(Nassau Tribune, October 8, 2009)
Mind you, this is not to say that the CCJ is the only real alternative. In fact, the jingoistic politics that have made CARICOM such a dysfunctional laughing stock actually militate against member states turning to this regional court as a replacement for the Privy Council.
Accordingly, we may find that the only viable alternative is for each CARICOM country to simply establish its own Supreme Court. To be sure, this would be an ironic default outcome; after all, a judiciary with a final court of appeal at its apex is a hallmark of any independent nation.
In any case, it is immature, irresponsible and, frankly, niggardly for Caribbean leaders to have relied all these years on our former colonial master to fulfill this essential function of our national self-determination.
At long last CARICOM Heads, have you no self-respect?!
NOTE: This commentary was also published today at Caribbean Net News, the most widely read newspaper in the Caribbean.
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Carson C. Cadogan says
Either Anthony L. Hall needs his head examining or he has been in washington far too long.
“each CARICOM country to simply establish its own Supreme Court.”
Is he a madman? If this is ever done democracy as we know it would disappear from the west Indies overnight.
Just take a look at the judicial system in Barbados and that would cure anyone of thoughts of their own Supreme Court as final court.
No one in the West Indies except the rich and powerful would ever receive “Justice” in the West Indies. They are cases before West Indian courts including Barbados that have been there for upwards of twenty years without being resolved.
Their is no hurry to dispense justice here in the West Indies. That is why West Indians have to turn to the Privy Council for true Justice, when this is removed as the saying goes here in Barbados then “Crappo smoke their pipe”.