During the recent sitting of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) in Barbados, BU has received information from a credible source that the CCJ justices met with Barbados’ judges and expressed to them their displeasure and dismay at the state of the Barbados courts. While the CCJ placed all the blame at the feet of the Barbados Judiciary, BU feels that the Registry must share this blame equally.
The source of the massive build-up of 3,500 cases that have remained unheard for years, or part-heard for years or on which judgements have been undelivered (reserved) for years stems from the time of the appointment of Sir David Simmons as chief justice, it can be revealed.
Prior to the appointment of Sir David Simmons, cases were motored through the courts by the lawyers themselves, who had to answer to their clients for delays or a failure to adequately prosecute matters.
However, Sir David changed the Civil Procedure Rules so that cases were assigned to judges, in actual fact and practice for the terms of the natural lives of each judge so assigned. This has created a situation where the Registry is able to blame the judges and the judges in their turn have a scapegoat in the Registry.
And both judges and Registry are playing this situation to the max to the detriment of litigants and taxpayers. Indeed, to the detriment of our off-shore investment industry which, as was recently noted by Opposition Leader Owen Arthur, has fallen off to crisis point. Although Mr Arthur stops short of laying the blame squarely where it belongs – on the shoulders of himself and his appointee as chief justice.
Several recent examples have come to light where judges clerks have telephoned counsel to advise that decisions will be given on a specific date at a specific time, counsel turns up in court only to be told that the judge is, variously, on holiday, out of the island, sick, not ready, etc.
Effectively, this means that counsel that have already juggled their schedules (usually on less than 24 hours notice from the judge’s chambers) have their time wasted and then have to bill their clients for their time which in good faith they had every reason to believe would be well spent, but in fact proves to be a complete waste of time and money attributable SOLELY to the judge in question.
In one standout case which has for the moment to remain nameless, delivery of a reserved judgement was scheduled with counsel turning up in court to receive the judgment (a judgement that had been by then reserved for over TWO YEARS) on a case that had been started almost 10 years ago. BUT, the call to receive judgement occurred not once, but several time……and this is the NORM! So if you have two counsel on each side, each of which is charging $500 per hour, litigants are being charged $4,000 for each occasion times the number of occasions.
Meanwhile, BU has ascertained from several counsel (some of them silks) that when they write to the Registrar, no response is even forthcoming – not even by e-mail. And the same thing from the judges.
But the favourite excuse of the judges for not providing judgements is that the Registry has not yet typed them up. This is the lamest of the lot. In other jurisdictions, judges read their judgements and orders that they have written by hand and copies of these handwritten judgements are then provided to counsel, pending the fully typed up version. These judgements bear witness to the crossed-out and initialled and re-drafted work of the judges – AND THEY ARE ENFORCEABLE so as to expedite the delivery of justice. But why should the Barbados court system try to expedite justice?
And all this rot set in solely during the tenure of Sir David Simmons who now, along with his political lobby, seems intent on trying to persuade a far from credulous Barbados public and NOT as the result of the total mess made by Sir David, but due to the failure of Chief Justice Gibson.
Unfortunately for Sir David, the very transparency of Chief Justice Gibson and Gibson CJ’s willingness to highlight the inherited problems he is facing and to discuss freely the solutions he would want to see put in place, have made Sir David’s tactics subject to universal condemnation. Likely out of most proper professional ethics, however, Gibson CJ does not mention the most effective solution which we all know is to fire 75% of the judges and the Registry, starting with the Registrar, all (or most) appointed by or on the advice of Sir David Simmons.
It is a sad circumstance that, Bajans having been raised from the cradle to respect judges and their support organisation, the Registry, now have no respect for them whatsoever, above all Barbados’ former chief justice.
Let those judges reflect that as they drive around Barbados with their official cars and police drivers and go into court with everyone bowing, the thought on every Bajan mind is that they are a bunch of freeloading parasites whose monumental egos and incompetence have ruined our justice system and our off-shore industry and who, rather than making any effort to support the efforts of the Chief Justice, are actively campaigning with the loser whom he replaced and exposing Barbados to international disdain, the ruin or our off-shore sector and the open and aggressive censure of the justices of the Caribbean Court of Justice. Almost every civil case that has come before the CCJ from Barbados has drawn uncomplimentary remarks on Barbados’ judicial system from the justices of the CCJ. One is hard-put to find any appeals from Barbados in the judgements of which the CCJ has not commented negatively on the length of time involved in the Barbados courts.
This is shameful and unacceptable and it clearly high time government provided the back-up to the CJ to take extraordinary measures to dismiss the persons responsible, rather than have these parasitic incompetents spending their working lives doing nothing but drag Barbados down both reputationally and financially and then expensing the taxpayers for the remainder of their lives to pay pensions to them.
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