Quote:I applaud Prime Minister Tillman Thomas’ call as current Chairman of CARICOM for
the West Indian people to be better informed and more intimately engaged in the regional
project. CARICOM is essentially about people; about West Indian people; but, in truth, it
is an infusion of people power that is needed to resuscitate CARICOM.

Quote:PART II
Nothing speaks louder of this current debilitation than our substantial denial of the
Caribbean Court of Justice. The Bar Association of Grenada is host to this Lecture Series
which is a memorial to a great West Indian lawyer. It is poignant that the Inaugural
Lecture in this series delivered in 1996 by J.S. Archibald Q.C. was entitled: Essentials for
a West Indies Supreme Court to replace the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as the
final Appellate Court for Commonwealth Caribbean States and Territories. Fifteen years
later, it is still apposite that I address this issue when we talk of being West Indian.
In 2001, twelve CARICOM countries decided they would abolish appeals to the Privy
Council and establish their own Caribbean Court of Justice serving all the countries of the
Caribbean Community with both original jurisdiction in regional integration matters and
appellate jurisdiction as the final court of appeal for individual CARICOM countries. As of
now, only Guyana (which had abolished appeals to the Privy Council on independence,
believing it to be a natural incident of ‘sovereignty’), Barbados and now Belize – have
conferred on the CCJ that appellate jurisdiction. It is instructive that in Guyana’s case, in
adopting the CCJ as its final court of appeal, it dispensed with its own national final Court
of Appeal, subordinating its own sovereignty to the logic of a Community Court of Appeal
– a Caribbean Community of which it is a part with all the other member states of
CARICOM, with whom one would expect the same logic to prevail.
Constitutional amendment is required for the abolition of appeals to the Privy Council. In
practical terms, this means bipartisan political support for the CCJ. In Jamaica and
Trinidad and Tobago (where the Court has its much sought after location) that political
consensus does not exist – because the political party now in office in each of those two
major regional jurisdictions has turned its back on its regional court. In St. Vincent and the
Grenadines, a referendum last year rejected the transference of appeals to the CCJ.
The situation has been complicated by the issue of the death penalty on which the Privy
Council, reflecting contemporary English (and EU) mores and jurisprudence has been
rigorous in upholding Caribbean appeals in death sentence cases. Someday, the Caribbean
as a whole must accept abolition of the death penalty – I believe we should have done so
already – but, in a situation of heightened crime in the region, popular sentiment has
induced political reticence. Even so, however, the Privy Council’s anachronistic