CJ: ACT ON COURTS NOW

Chief Justice Sat Sharma, in commenting last Thursday on the dilapidated condition of many of the nation’s courthouses, has alluded to another unsatisfactory situation, that of delayed justice at the San Fernando Magistrates’ Courts, as a result of cases having to be adjourned because of overcrowding there.

But the situation at San Fernando could have been greatly eased and certainly solved temporarily had the authorities acted expeditiously to utilise two buildings which had been retained for use by both the Magistrates’ and the High Courts. Instead, because of bureaucratic indifference, the buildings have been allowed to remain unoccupied and with close to $1 million paid in rent, because, seemingly, a specific architect has not been available. It is an unsympathetic and almost dismissive attitude exhibited by those responsible. All of this while, as CJ Sharma has noted, the San Fernando Magistrates’ Court was overcrowded, the prisoners’ cells were too small, and sitting magistrates being able to deal only with the lists and adjourn cases. some lawyers had complained on another occasion the stench of faeces from prisoners’ cells making working by lawyers and others difficult in the Court rooms above.

Clearly, someone should be held accountable for the non occupying of the rented buildings. It is enough for the country, and by extension the taxpayers having to pay out approximately $1 million in rent with money, which could have been more effectively used toward the renovating of the San Fernando Magistrates’ Courts. Or if not, then one of the other Courts identified by the Chief Justice at Chaguanas, Siparia and Rio Claro. Yet whether the money literally thrown down the drain was $1 million or $1 it would have been the principle that ultimately mattered. The outrageous situation of unsatisfactory conditions at the country’s courts did not merely surface last week or last year, but “has been going on for the last 50 years,” as Chief Justice Sharma has pointed out, adding that “nobody has been taking us on.” What the CJ has told the country, via the media, is that the problem has been around even before Trinidad and Tobago gained its Independence in 1962. He has insisted, and rightly, that the correcting of the problem “has to be given priority in a way that it is effective, and to bring collective relief to the various courts I have spoken about.”

But even as bureaucracy drags proverbial feet on providing acceptable relief to the long nagging problem Government appears set to further aggravate it, through the possible relocating of Parliament from the Red House to a nearby complex, which includes the recently renovated and expanded Port of Spain Magistrates’ Courts on St Vincent Street. For years, these Courts had been at the NIPDEC complex on Cipriani Boulevard, to which they had been ‘‘temporarily’’ relocated for several years, following on the building housing the Magistrates’ Courts being held to be unsuitable in its then state, and in need of urgent repairs. The Courts were rehoused relatively recently at St Vincent Street, only to be faced this time with possible permanent eviction to make way for the shifting of Parliament to the area bounded by St Vincent, Knox, Abercromby and Duke Streets in which they and other buildings are sited. Repairs to existing courthouses, or even their rebuilding, should this be found necessary, would conceivably take a fraction of what would be required to design and construct a new Parliament building. Perhaps, the current Administration, which has often spoken, and loftily, of priorities may wish in its wisdom to see the provision of suitable accommodation in which justice is dispensed a greater priority than any self serving shift of the Prime Minister’s Office to the Red House.