The performance of High Court judges is very inadequate, Acting Chancellor of the Judiciary Carl Singh said yesterday while noting that timeliness in the delivery of decisions is critical to the judicial system.
Justice Singh was speaking during the opening session of an Exit Workshop to end the six-year-old Modernization of the Justice Administration System (MJAS) Project. The workshop which lasted for a few hours was held at the Duke Lodge in Kingston.
Justice Singh used the opportunity to inform those gathered about some of the challenges that the judiciary currently faces. He said that with revised rules or no revised rules, “the performance of the judges in the Supreme Court is woefully inadequate and criticism in that regard is justified”. He said he had repeatedly said that the hallmark of an efficient and an effective judicial system is timeliness in the delivery of decisions. He told the gathering of a case before the court where a decision is outstanding for a judge to determine that the matter is abandoned. That decision, he said is four to five years old. “This is where the blot lies on the judicial system and it must change,” he stressed before noting that there have been successes and huge developments in systems and infrastructure.
