The Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) has dismissed applications from three Barbadian men wanted in the United States.
The men, Sean Gaskin, Frederick Christopher Hawkesworth and John Wayne Scantlebury, had filed separate applications for an extension of time within which to seek special leave to appeal to this Court, as well as special leave to appeal.
They also filed an application for leave to appeal to this Court as a poor person.
The CCJ in a ruling said that while the appeals were filed separately they were heard together.
“Given that the circumstances surrounding each of them are almost identical it is accepted that they would either all succeed or all be denied,” the CJ said.
The CCJ said that it heard the applications by audio conference on January 28 this year and dismissed the applications promising to give a written judgment at a later date.
The men were arrested in 2004 in connection with extradition proceedings initiated by the United States government.
The CCJ noted that the matter had been heard in the courts in and in July 2008, the Court of Appeal granted leave to appeal to the CCJ “as of right to an intended appellant in any civil or criminal proceedings which involve a question as to the interpretation of the Constitution”.
It said that the Court of Appeal imposed two conditions in granting leave to appeal to CCJ including that the applicants rovide security for costs in the amount of BDS$15 000.00 (US$7,500) within 60 days from the date of the making of that court’s order
The CCJ noted that the applicants did not comply with the Court of Appeal’s order and that no security for costs was provided.
It said instead they filed a notice of appeal in December 2009 and took no further step until June last year when they filed an application to the Court of Appeal for leave to appeal in relation to the pending appeal.
But the Court of Appeal dismissed this application for failure to comply with the rules and last December they filed an appeal before the CCJ.
In their case, the applicants claim they are impoverished and was and remains unable to provide security and secondly, that the matters raised by his appeal involve a question as to the interpretation of the Constitution.
But in its ruling the CCJ said “we are wholly unimpressed by these submissions”, listing also a number of breaches the applicants made in getting the matter before the Port of Spain based regional court, which serves as Barbados’s final court.
“This is a case where repeated and egregious breaches of the rules have served only to prolong the final disposition of a hearing before the Chief Magistrate that is still to be completed. There is no cogent explanation for the several breaches.
“Since the liberty of the subject (s) was at stake the Applicant(s) himself should not have been as dilatory as he was. In any event it is a profound error to believe that a litigant can flout the rules, thus rendering them utterly meaningless and then take shelter under cover of the overriding objective. In all these circumstances we had no choice but to dismiss this application and to order costs to the Respondents,” the CCJ ruled. (CMC)
