ST. JOHN’S – Caribbean countries are being asked to re-examine the US$100 million Trust Fund that had been established to fund the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).
The Fund had been established amid concerns that judges of the CCJ would be paid by governments which could exert decisive informal pressure on them to deliver judgments favourable to regional governments.
The Caribbean Court of Justice Trust Fund is administered by a Board of Trustees drawn from regional entities and as a consequence, the CCJ is the only integration court of its kind financially independent of the largesse of governments and free from their administrative control.
But now, Justice Ralston Nelson, one of the judges of the Port of Spain-based Court, said the time has come for a review of the US$100 million initiative given the changing global economic and financial environment.
“I think when the sum of 100 million US dollars was arrived at, obviously the data they had considered would not have included the collapse of interest rates and the collapse of a large part of the financial world in 2008.
“So that any calculations you would have made prior to setting up that fund now have to be revised anyway so that there is that aspect of it…and I think truth to tell is that the operations of the court were not fully looked at,” Justice Nelson told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC).
He said “the whole question of the cost of having a Commission was never seriously looked at and those costs are real costs.
“If you were to revive now those figures in light of what you now know you will find that we do require a new injection, that’s my personal view. It may not be a painful injection in the sense that in the same way the CDB (Caribbean Development Bank) borrowed 100 million and allocated portions of each state and backed by a sovereign government, the same way that could be done,” he said.
Justice Nelson said that the US$100 million borrowed in 2008 has not almost been paid up “so that if there was a continuation of the loan with new funds, I don’t think it would put the governments under any additional pressure”.
The CCJ, established in 2001 to replace the London-based Privy Council, also acts as an international tribunal interpreting the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas that governs the regional integration movement.
The CCJ also has original and appellate jurisdictions and while most of the Caribbean countries have signed on to the original jurisdiction, only Barbados, Guyana and Belize are signatories to the appellate jurisdiction. (CMC)