We can run the Caribbean Court of Justice

By James E. Knight

As the Trinidad & Tobago-based Caribbean Court of Justice vs the London-Privy Council debate gets stronger, I cannot help but experience a flash back to the time when the big debate was about breaking free of the colonial London & Cambridge GCE examinations and establishing our own Caribbean Examinations Council, to create our own curriculum and set testing for our own students.

It might sound quite foolish to all today but, back then, there were those who strongly opposed this anti-colonial assertion of confidence and pride in ourselves.

A minister of education in Antigua & Barbuda at that time was probably the strongest and most vocal opponent to the establishment of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC).
He led those who argued that we lacked the standard to set proper examinations, the competence to organize the process, and the fairness required to mark papers in this small region, where those doing the marking could find themselves working on the papers of students who they knew personally. These are the same self-degrading arguments being used against the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) today.

How about the argument that smallness of size and population, and the familiarity and friendship of the judges with powerful people in the society, would influence the decisions handed down by the CCJ?

Well, even though an effort might be made to avoid having persons marking CXC papers work on those from their own country, it is difficult for me to imagine, that a Jamaican, a Guyanese, or a Dominican, marking papers from Antigua & Barbuda, would not come across the work of students whose parents they might know very well, either as friends or adversaries. Yet, until now, there has been no outcry of injustice.

Among the people throughout Latin America, with their deep and instinctive sense of anti-colonialism, and their strong history of anti-imperialism, you would never find anyone arguing that a court in Spain, or Portugal, or the United States, should be their final court of appeal.
Not in Africa and Asia – where many of their countries are members of the so-called British Commonwealth – can you find people arguing for the Privy Council in England.

You ask an English-speaking African on the continent, with a history going way back to ancient times, of settling their own legal issues, whether by village tribunal, chief or king, and with a modern history of highly educated members of the judiciary, if they would wish the Privy Council to be their final court of appeal. I am quite sure that the sobering answer would be quite clear and short.
“I went to school in England with their judges and I was smarter than them.” Many might wish to call such an African arrogant and boastful. But, oh no; that response comes from a clear historical understanding and a deep sense of confidence and pride. These are the anti-colonial sentiments that we need to instill in this region.

The Privy Council has played a notorious role in Caribbean history. This was an institution that was used to give a semblance of legality to the horrendous crime against humanity that was slavery in the Caribbean. Child labor and general abuse, brutal murder, rape, torture, etc,. were not crimes here, because we were not humans – we were chattel.
We were counted among the donkeys and mules. The Privy Council sat in England where all that was illegal, and overlooked it all in the Caribbean.

The Privy Council declared killing a slave an act of murder when the slave trade was abolished. Given this nasty detail of history, what greater moral authority can the the London-based institution have among us today than can our own?

We in this English-speaking Caribbean, having been brought here, used and abused, and then abandoned penniless to struggle from scratch, have established regional institutions that are enviable to many people elsewhere in the world. The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank is another example. There is a common currency, which is holding strong, and which even Montserrat, a British colony, uses. Other British overseas territories in the region don’t even have a currency; they are forced to use somebody else’s dollar.

Let us have some faith and pride in ourselves, and reject the lingering remnants of institutions that supported slavery and British colonialism. After all, the British themselves have their misgivings about their own jurists, but they are not calling for our eminent jurists down here to handle their cases.

We, on the other hand, are the last set of people in former British colonies, still hanging on to the wigs and frock tails of the British.
We run CXC. We can run the CCJ.

James E. Knight is a former editor of Outlet newspaper, which was the organ of The Antigua-Caribbean Liberation Movement (ACLM). The original version of this article was published in the Caribbean News Now publication.