Caribbean & Central America - October 2009 (ISSN 1741-4458)

The cause of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) has been given a boost from an unexpected source: Britain's Lord Phillips, the president of the UK's Supreme Court, has complained that dealing with cases from former colonies takes up too much of the time of Britain's top judges. In a late-September interview with the Financial Times, Phillips said that "in an ideal world" Commonwealth countries would stop using the Privy Council and set up their own final courts of appeal instead.

The CCJ is something of a hybrid institution. It exercises original jurisdiction over the interpretation of the Treaty establishing the Caribbean Community (Caricom); it also makes itself available as an appellate court of last resort. In its role interpreting the governance and workings of Caricom, the CCJ has jurisdiction over Antigua & Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts & Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent & The Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad & Tobago. In its role as a court of last resort for Caribbean Community countries, only two states have so far submitted to its jurisdiction: Barbados and Guyana.

The intervention by Lord Philips does appear to have had the desired effect. Although the attorney general of The Bahamas, Brent Symonette, responded to Philips by just suggesting a limitation on the number of appeals to the Privy Council, most other regional responses were in favour of a move to local appellate jurisdiction.  Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St Vincent & the Grenadines, welcomed what he called “a notice to quit colonial premises". Grenada's Prime Minister Tillman Thomas said he was “very happy to hear it being said". Belize and Dominica have also indicated their desire to drop appeals to the Privy Council. And, perhaps most importantly of all, Jamaica's Prime Minister Bruce Golding said on 6 October that while his Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) has harboured reservations about the CCJ “now we are in a position_where we can do a revaluation".

Although Jamaica launched the original proposal for a Caribbean Court of Appeal in 1970, it has been one of the most prominent laggards in switching to the CCJ. The JLP's concerns have included the idea that judges would be appointed by Caricom political leaders and that the court could become hostage to a lack of financing. These concerns have largely been addressed. The judges of the CCJ are appointed by a Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission of 11 members. On the funding side, ministers of finance have been mandated to provide funding for the recurrent expenses of the Court, and a Trust Fund has been established with US$100m to enable the recurrent expenditure of the court to be funded by income from the fund.

Even stronger support for Jamaica's participation in the CCJ has been voiced by Seymour Panton, the president of Jamaica's Court of Appeal, who has said: “The only people who are interested in keeping the Privy Council are the very wealthy, murderers, and the ones with colonial mentality."

The reference to “murderers" is an important one as there has been a perception in some quarters that the motivation for joining the CCJ is to negate the Privy Council's objections to the application of the death penalty.  However, supporters of the CCJ say that revived interest in the court as the Caribbean's court of last resort can be dated back to the Report of the West Indian Commission in 1992, which predated the landmark Privy Council decision to commute the death penalty in the case of Pratt and Morgan in 1993.