A hanging court?

THE CARIBBEAN Court of Justice which comes into operation by year end is expected to be another regional institution which not only emerges from the post-colonial sovereign impulse of West Indian societies, however belated that may be, but is also expected to demonstrate our own sophistication in governing ourself according to the rule of law. In this sense, the CCJ will be a kindred institution to the University of the West Indies which was born out of the need of newly independent WI states to organise the tertiary education of their own people instead of depending on overseas universities as we did in colonial times.

On the one hand, then, it is good to learn that popular regional support for the CCJ now stands at 84 percent but, on the other hand, it is disheartening to hear criticism of the Court coming from prominent persons within our region who should know better. One prominent WI jurist has sought to brand the CCJ "a hanging court," expressing the miopic view that the real motivation for setting up the Court is to facilitate the implementation of capital punishment having regard to decisions of the Privy Council in recent years which have virtually imposed a moratorium on hangings among Caricom states.

We find this submission quite absurd for three main reasons. The first is the fact which Barbados Attorney General Mia Mottley pointed out on Friday, that Caricom Heads of Government had agreed to set up the CCJ in 1987, seven years before the Privy Council's anti-hanging ruling in the Pratt and Morgan Case. Secondly, what the Law Lords have succeeded in doing is to inject their abolitionist views into our judicial system which requires our courts to impose the mandatory sentence of hanging on convicted murderers. This, in our view, amounts to an impertinence by the Law Lords who cannot frustrate the operation of our criminal justice system by taking the decision for us to abolish the death penalty. That is a matter we must decide for ourselves.

We expect, of course, that the judges we appoint to the CCJ will be selected from among the promiment jurists of the region and the Commonwealth and that they will approach matters coming before them impartially and independently, strictly according to the law and without any abolitionist bias. How, in heaven's name, could such a court be deemed "a hanging court?” Thirdly, we would like to adopt the sentiments expressed by the Barbados AG when she said: "The reality is that in this region we not only have to love our own, but we must also respect our own." AG Mottley noted that the CCJ will acquire its own prestige and stature by the quality of judgments delivered by its judges who, she felt sure, would have the required intellectual capacity, judgment, integrity and sensitivity.

In view of all this and the fact that the UNC government had been progressively engaged in the creative processes for the CCJ, we are taken aback by the opposition to the Court now coming from within the ranks of that party. Last Wednesday, Siparia MP Kamla Persad-Bissessar declared that establishment of the CCJ in Trinidad was pointless, given the rate at which the country's citizens were being murdered. Being an attorney herself, we find such logic bewildering. The fact is that, unlike the Privy Council, the CCJ will not be a court to which convicted murderers can appeal as a strategy to escape the sentence duly imposed on them. Instead of being pointless, then, the CCJ could be quite relevant in TT as it would deal with murder cases strictly according to their merits and cold-blooded killers will no longer have the Law Lords to rescue them from the hangman. But then, in a policy of objecting for the sake of it, reason and logic can become a nuisance.