– Judge Robinson
President of the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, Judge Patrick Robinson of Jamaica yesterday called on Caribbean governments to move in the direction of accepting the CCJ as the region’s final appellate court.
The law, he said, will never be truly transformative in the Caribbean until “we can be the final arbiters…”
He argued that it is not for a panel of foreigners occasionally sprinkled with a Caribbean judge to determine regional law; a reference to the Privy Council in England which remains the final appellate court for several countries.
Robinson, speaking at the launch of the Unite to End Violence Against Women campaign in Barbados, said it was disgraceful that only three countries in the region currently accept the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as the their final court.
Robinson called on regional governments to “move in the direction of the CCJ”, which he said provides the region with its own sovereignty. He opined that judicial sovereignty is a natural companion of political sovereignty, noting that “this sovereignty should have been ours from the minute we became independent yet so many years later we are still searching for it”.
Since its establishment, the CCJ has been the final court of appeal for Guyana, Barbados and recently, Belize, and it has long been held that the inclusion of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago would cement the court’s status as an important regional institution.
Recently, a group of regional statesmen warn against potential T&T abandonment of CCJ process saying that issues have arisen in Trinidad and Tobago which could threaten the very existence of the Caribbean Court of Justice.
They are calling on the island’s administration to distance itself from what they call “retrogressive developments.”
Signatories to the statement included Sir George Alleyne, Sir Shridath Ramphal, former Jamaica Prime Minister PJ Patterson, Sir Alister McIntyre and Dominica’s President Nicholas Liverpool. (Iana Seales in Barbados)
