Senior Counsel Ralph Ramkarran yesterday rapped President Irfaan Ali and his Cabinet over the continuing failure to make confirmed appointments to the top two posts in the judiciary and to recompose the Judicial Service Commission (JSC).
In his column in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek, Ramkarran noted that President Ali had stated that he was not ready to deal with the appointments of a Chancellor of the Judiciary and a Chief Justice (CJ). Ramkarran, a former two-term Speaker of the National Assembly, further pointed out that Ali has not given any indication of when he will be ready to address this matter.
“The President’s consideration of the matter in his ‘deliberate judgement’ cannot be open ended. The President has a lawful responsibility under the constitution to make these appointments. It is not contemplated by the constitution that if there is no obstacle to the appointments, that the President’s ‘deliberate judgement’ can serve to indefinitely delay the performance of this vital constitutional duty. The Attorney General is expected to advise accordingly”, Ramkarran asserted.
Ali has been put on the spot by Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton who has said that he is prepared to support the confirmation of both Chancellor of the Judiciary, Yonette Cummings and CJ Roxane George and that the ball was now in the President’s court. There has been no confirmed appointments to these posts for many years as the Presidents and Opposition Leaders over the period have failed to reach agreement on candidates. For confirmed appointments, both the President and the Opposition Leader must agree to the candidates.
While in Office, APNU+AFC had opposed the confirmation of Justice George as CJ but Norton has now said he will accept the confirmed appointments of both justices Cummings and George.
Norton made his position formally known to the government at the end of May this year but nearly three months later President Ali has done nothing despite the fact that all sides have accepted that there is a pressing need for confirmed appointments. President Ali could signal either his agreement to confirm the two justices or make a different proposal. He has done neither.
In his column yesterday, Ramkarran pointed out that the last confirmed Chief Justice was Desiree Bernard from 1996 to 2001 and the last confirmed Chancellor was the same Justice Bernard from 2001 to 2005.
Since then, the positions have been held under acting appointments by Justices Carl Singh, Ian Chang, Cummings and George. Ramkarran said that the situation is so unsatisfactory that on two occasions in the past, two Presidents of the CCJ have called for the appointments of the Chancellor and Chief Justice. In November 2017 Sir Denis Byron, the then President of the CCJ, in an address to the Guyana Bar Association, called for the acting appointments to these positions to be confirmed. Current President of the CCJ Adrian Saunders has also called for the confirmation of the appointments to these positions and urged that they be done before the end of the year.
Ramkarran said that there is currently no obstacle to confirming these appointments or, if the Government so chooses, to seek out other candidates to place before the Leader of the Opposition for his consent.
The columnist also homed in on the backlog in the legal system caused by the failure to recompose the JSC.
Ramkarran said that over recent years, with the implementation of the Civil Procedure Rules, the work of the High Court has been transformed.
“Cases which took five to seven years to complete are now concluded in twelve months. This advance in the work of the High Court, presided over by Chancellor Cummings and Chief Justice George, and which could not have been accomplished without their indefatigable commitment, was even more dramatically improved with the introduction of hearings of matters in the High Court, Court of Appeal and CCJ by electronic means. While these improvements have been nothing short of spectacular, similar attention has not been made to the Court of Appeal and the Magistrates Courts. It takes five or more years for an appeal to be heard. The simple reason is that the complement of five judges in the Court of Appeal has not been filled for over fifteen years. For all this time the Court of Appeal has been short of two judges, with only three judges burdened with the load of five. The Court of Appeal now needs six judges to have two panels sitting simultaneously. This would require a constitutional amendment, which the Opposition should have no difficulty in supporting”, he stated.
Like the confirmation of the appointments of the Chancellor and Chief Justice, Ramkarran said that there is no known obstacle to the appointment of the JSC.
“This is the body that appoints magistrates, judges of the High Court and of the Court of Appeal. Currently there are eleven judges, one having recently retired. Another is due to retire shortly. The reduced complement of judges will jeopardise the great achievements which have been made recently because the large volume of litigation that inundates the High Court every day gets larger every year. For the Chief Justice to administer this volume and find judges, whose diaries are usually full, to manage this inundation, is already an impossible task. The High Court Act provides for twenty judges. So, there is a solution. But in the absence of a Judicial Service Commission, these potential solutions cannot be addressed”, Ramkarran added.
Ramkarran said that it is known that the Attorney General is conscious of these problems but that he is a member of a collective called a Cabinet which is headed by a chief executive called the President.
“The failure to appoint a Chancellor and Chief Justice and the Judicial Service Commission is a clear indication that the collective does not consider the judiciary as an agency of any importance or its problems as a matter of urgency, notwithstanding its constitutional status. This is extremely shortsighted. Investors are flooding into Guyana. Among their prominent concerns are the integrity of the security forces and the efficiency of the judiciary. The former is under public scrutiny. Problems affecting the latter remain unaddressed for no known reason”, Ramkarran said.
