The question has been asked sometimes why do we need a Caribbean Court of Justice. The short and simple response is that without it the CARICOM Single Market and Economy will certainly not function effectively. For it is inevitable that in the cut and thrust of the commercial and economic life involving trade in goods, in services, trans-community investment and movement of skilled labour as well as the dynamics of social life within that market, there will be disputes. And it would be unrealistic to expect that the individual courts of each of our 15 Member States would uniformly interpret the Treaty that governs the Single Market and Economy. The differences which are virtually certain to arise would be a recipe for chaos.
The people who live within our Region and those who do business within it must be made to feel certain that there is an impartial tribunal to which they can turn for consistent interpretation and rulings on any issue when there is a dispute. Without such a tribunal, our efforts at creating a viable, sustainable and prosperous Caribbean through the Single Market and Economy would come to nought, wrecked on the shores of numerous and varied interpretations of the same statutes.
Secondly, it must be noted that the idea for such a Court with final jurisdiction is not new – far from it. Since the beginning of the last century, the people of the Caribbean and their leaders have been making out a case for establishing their own court and discontinuing that dependence on the Privy Council in the United Kingdom for final judgement on matters of life and death. That call was repeated at various intervals throughout the 20th century.
In that regard, countries in the Caribbean are no different from more than 30 other Commonwealth countries, which took the step of severing the link from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the final Court of Appeal. These countries include, Canada, India, Australia, Tanzania, Ghana and, right here in our region, Guyana. It is reported that New Zealand is soon to take this step.
It is also, however, not as if what is proposed would deny our Region of judicial learning and expertise from outside the Community. The judges of the Court according to the Agreement establishing the Court, can be drawn for example, from other Commonwealth countries. In any case our Community has produced legal luminaries fit to have served as Chief Justices in many countries of the world, in the International Court of Justice and recently in the very International Criminal Court.
Also initial concerns regarding the possibility of political influence on the establishment and functioning of the Court and in relation to its independent financing have been satisfactorily dealt with in a manner that should satisfy even the greatest cynic.
Whatever the pros and cons are for the establishment of CCJ one fundamental question remains in the minds of our society. And that is: can a people be truly independent when the most critical issues of governance, of social relevance, of economic importance and indeed of personal life and death are being determined in another society, thousands of miles away, by persons who may never have even touched the shores of that society?
The people of our region deserve to have the dignity of their fate being decided by the learned legal lights of our society. It is as the former Chief Justice of Trinidad and Tobago Michael de la Bastide said the “completion of our Independence.” In my view with the establishment of the CCJ, the circle will have been completed and we would have taken a giant step towards making the Caribbean whole.
It is therefore, my considered view that the Caribbean Court of Justice is not only overdue but is an indispensable vehicle for moving the Caribbean forward. There is hardly a better gift to our Community on this its 30th Anniversary than the inauguration of this court, later this year.
