BELIZE PRIME MINISTER Dean Barrow is the right man to get more countries into the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).
Barrow, CARICOM’s new chairman, readily qualifies for inclusion among the true-blue Caribbean regionalists.
For not long after he became prime minister in 2008, Barrow decided to ditch the British Privy Council in London as his nation’s court of last resort in favour of the appellate jurisdiction of the Caribbean Court of Justice, joining Barbados and Guyana. It was a thundering decision that was implemented in 2010. In effect, he did what most CARICOM leaders haven’t done up to this day. After all, Belize is CARICOM’s lone member-state in Spanish-speaking Central America. Its bold move spoke volumes about Barrow’s commitment to regionalism and about his firm recognition of the high quality of Caribbean jurisprudence.
That’s why it didn’t come as a surprise when on assuming the Caricom chairmanship a few days ago, succeeding Freundel Stuart, Barbados’ PM, Barrow with his trademark eloquence, spoke about the need to get more countries under the CCJ’s appellate umbrella. As one of the Caribbean’s top legal minds, he was really calling out many of his prime ministerial colleagues for engaging in what the late Prime Minister of Barbados, David Thompson, often called “a lot of long talk”.
Here was the way Barrow put it: “The creation of our own jurisprudence will help define us as a people, and the excellent, well reasoned judgments which have been the hallmark of the CCJ are ample proof of the intellectual quality of the legal minds of this community. During my stewardship of the Community, I look forward to more member-states joining the four of us (Barbados, Guyana, Belize and Dominica) in the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ.”
Well said.
We wouldn’t be surprised if Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and St Lucia were high on Barrow’s list of countries which should have accepted the appellate jurisdiction by now. Take the case of Trinidad and Tobago, the court’s home. It fought long and hard and succeeded in getting the CCJ headquarters on its soil. But a decade after the court was launched, its host hasn’t taken the logical step of accepting its appellate jurisdiction. All the countries recognise the CCJ’s original jurisdiction. Next is Jamaica. Many of its nationals, certainly not all, have wrongly suggested that the court can’t be trusted to give objective legal decisions based on evidence. That’s a terrible and unfair indictment of the jurists, at least one of whom is a Jamaican. With an election around the corner in Jamaica it’s going to be interesting to see if accepting the appellate jurisdiction becomes a campaign issue. The major stumbling block has always been the negative attitude of the Jamaica Labour Party to the indigenous top court.
It must be acknowledged that St Vincent and the Grenadines, led by Dr Ralph Gonsalves, tried but failed to get a referendum approved by the populace so that it could join the appellate jurisdiction. Dr Gonsalves, who recently won his fourth consecutive term in office, should try again.
Some OECS member-states cite the need for a referendum to decide the matter but it’s not clear that such a claim is true for all of them. Now that Dominica has courageously broken the OECS logjam by joining the court last year, the rest should see the wisdom.
It’s really an acute embarrassment that so many independent Caribbean states, two of them almost 54 years old, now linger at the Privy Council’s door, well knowing that Britain doesn’t want them there.
Clearly, Barrow is well placed to get that message across to his colleagues.
