Why are we clinging on to the Privy Council?
THE EDITOR, Madam:
I SEEK to add a few questions arising, in particular, out of the thought-provoking Sunday Gleaner article by A.J. Nicholson, ‘Emancipate your thinking, Minister Chuck’:
1. Why is it that, after near 140 years since Emancipation, apart from a couple of very small island territories in the Pacific – Vanuatu and Tuvalu – the only former colonies of Britain that continue to cling to the Privy Council which, from the beginning, has always been inaccessible and unaffordable to perhaps 99 per cent of their citizens, are former slave plantation territories in the Caribbean?
2. Why do the rulers of some of the larger territories in these independent Caribbean states (which do not require referenda), by the position they have assumed, take this totally different view to that of the authorities in those sister regional territories where the decision has been made to accede to the internationally endorsed Caribbean Court of Justice?
3. Is there any conclusion other than that the rulers in these politically independent countries are content for this high percentage of their population – for the most part, by far, descendants of slaves – to be in no better position in relation to this matter of access to justice than their dismissed and deprived forbears were placed at Emancipation?
4. Isn’t it uncanny, for example, how on this matter of access to justice in a practising democracy, the present administration, in this year of our Lord 2022, are of no different mindset than Jamaica’s imperial rulers in Whitehall in 1833, when the Privy Council was created?
5. Is there any wonder, then, that the former president of Jamaica’s appeal court was moved to seek answers from the Bar associations in the Caribbean as to the reason(s) for their pregnant silence and prolonged lack of concern about this matter of exceptional injustice, which their visionary predecessor associations sought to address, and to have corrected, as long as over five decades ago, in the 1960s?
DOUGLAS LEYS
Attorney-at-law