In Trinidad: Lack of paper cripples court proceedings

 (Trinidad Guardian) Frus­trat­ed over the ab­sence of print­ing pa­per in the Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do Supreme Courts for the past two weeks, a judge yes­ter­day said the Ju­di­cia­ry ap­pears to be on the brink of col­lapse.

The plain-spo­ken Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad vent­ed his frus­tra­tion in open court, par­tic­u­lar­ly to for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan SC and Shawn Roop­nar­ine. Seep­er­sad said last week he had to send his staff to pur­chase print­ing pa­per to make hard copies of doc­u­ments dur­ing a three-day tri­al in the Port-of-Spain High Court. Yes­ter­day in San Fer­nan­do, Seep­er­sad said he was forced to ad­journ a mat­ter in­volv­ing Star­lite Shop­ping Plaza Ltd vs Fel­ton Reno to to­mor­row be­cause there was no pa­per to print a con­sent or­der which was emailed by the Port-of-Spain-based at­tor­neys in or­der for him to sign it. The judge asked the at­tor­ney to walk with a hard copy of the con­sent to­day.

Say­ing that the sit­u­a­tion was un­ac­cept­able, the judge said, “It is ev­i­dent to me as a sit­ting judge that the in­sti­tu­tion ap­pears to be on the brink of col­lapse and the on­ly rea­son that chaos has not en­sued is that in­di­vid­ual judges are cog­nisant of their con­sti­tu­tion­al oblig­a­tion and the needs and rights of cit­i­zens.

“It can­not be that a judge must send staff to pur­chase pa­per so that or­ders could be en­tered and for­ward­ed to judge­ments and or­ders. It ap­pears to me that, un­for­tu­nate­ly, the time may soon come, de­spite the best in­ten­tions of judges, the lack of ad­min­is­tra­tive sup­port may ren­der it im­pos­si­ble for us, and I can speak for my­self, to con­tin­ue dis­charg­ing my con­sti­tu­tion­al oblig­a­tions.”

Ask­ing for the sup­port of mem­bers of the bar, he said it can­not be busi­ness as usu­al when the nec­es­sary re­sources to the meet the ba­sic op­er­at­ing de­mands seem to ei­ther be in­ad­e­quate or not be­ing pro­por­tioned for the pur­pos­es for which they are in­tend­ed.

“The bot­tom line is that we can­not con­tin­ue un­der the cir­cum­stances and when sit­u­a­tions arise and the court is un­able to ei­ther en­ter your or­ders to give you writ­ten judge­ments, it is not be­cause the court is de­flect­ing its re­spon­si­bil­i­ty. But I think the time has come, at least from my per­spec­tive, to stop try­ing to fix things that are out­side of my re­mit and which re­al­ly ought not to en­gage ju­di­cial at­ten­tion,” he said.

A staff mem­ber al­so com­plained that on the third floor Seep­er­sad was as­signed to yes­ter­day, which com­pris­es a reg­istry, a crim­i­nal and a civ­il court, the air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem was not work­ing for yet an­oth­er time.

A fe­male judge who com­ment­ed on the sit­u­a­tion un­der a con­di­tion of anonymi­ty said it was the ju­di­cia­ry is in au­topi­lot and there is no lead­er­ship or di­rec­tion.

“God help us all,” she said.