AS one who has been in and out of (Trinidad and Tobago’s) High Court, Magistrate’s courts, police cells, and who has been subject to over 10 arrests and innumerable charges, I am convinced that Government is the key to injustice; and the Privy Council is one of the keys to it. The following are seven reasons why.

Party politics came to Trinidad and Tobago in the immediate aftermath of post-World War Two. The ironies and absurdities of electoral party politics are well chronicled in V.S. Naipaul’s novel, ‘The Suffrage of Elvira’.
Dr. Eric Williams made it known that the party was the thing. It was the ultimate moral or Manichean vehicle to propel us into a post-independence future. Williams was in turn satirised in Sparrow’s calypso for his dictatorship over the party: “PNM is mine, lock, stock and barrel” (Get to Hell Outa Here). Party dictatorship came into being; a benign variant of the conception of party supremacy practised in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Franco’s Spain and Peron’s Argentina, for example.
The Party was the ultimate vehicle for mobilisation, rule, execution and storm-trooping – or jibing – of opponents. Partisan ideology binds us lock, stock and barrel. An ideology is a shared mania; it is radioactive. It permeates the society through and through; our institutions, cultures and economic and political systems. It is an equal-opportunity virus; transmuting governments, states and eras.
Many crimes in Trinidad and Tobago go undetected and unpunished. Two or three high-profile assassinations involving members of the legal profession, occurring over the last two decades, have remained unsolved. A well-meaning judge may easily become intimidated and alter his decision; judgments containing abysmal non sequiturs, selective use of facts, inattention to the pertinent facts, self-contradiction, a sudden break at the end where conclusion does not match proposition or analysis, are tell-tale signs of external pressures. The text, gaps in the text, tells it all.
In our long and brutal system of slavery, immigration and settlement of our territories, many of our ancestral systems of justice were abandoned, truncated, banned or forgotten.
Many of our peoples arriving on our shores came from village communities, hinterland ethnic groups in Spain, Africa, Portugal, Ireland, India, China for example.
We have shifted away from their time-worn localised systems of justice to the bureaucratic centralisation of our justice system. A plethora of disputes – land, marriage, neighbour, theft, praedial larceny, drugs and gun usage – bedevil our local communities. The bureaucratic, centralised system cannot handle these. Our failure to protect or develop local, community-based systems of juridicial rule, local courts run by elders for example, panchayaats, is patently evident; this exerts ruinous, fractious, flagellating pressure on community life; it exhausts the centralised bureaucratic judicial system.
The centralised bureaucracy itself isn’t working well. The New Rules campaign has tried to reform court processes themselves.

But contiguous cogs in the wheel of justice remain broken. Day after day, hundreds of Remand Yard prisoners file into cages at district courts for stealing a whacker, alimony payments, a few grams of weed, resisting arrest, minor traffic violations, and they are sent back to the Yard, ordered to come back, in two, three, four months.

All because they lack a lawyer, or money or judicial smarts. The proverbial dotish “lil” boys, dem stupid man, and dem. The prison officer, the police, the magistrate, the stand-by improvising lawyer cannot help the system. It is the Government which must intervene.
Government has continuously failed to reform. The penal system remains primitive, callous and brutal.
Political populism has become the drumbeat at the heart of our democracy. This happens when political leaders and administrations dole out token subsidies, reliefs, goods and services, the 10-day job, the grant, the fund.
A continual recycling of a system of patronage and dole. This is harmful to the long-term interests of the nation; it is not sustainable; it fools the people and is anti-developmental. Superficial decisions are made by our leaders to impress, to secure future electoral victories. An Attorney General and a Government might wish to rush the Caribbean Court of Appeal agenda two months before an election, in order to claim that they have “done something good”; without careful thought and consultation.
In an era of renewed globalisation, the globalisation of cricket, finance, technology, communications, weapons, and culinary – dog meat – habits, it is imperative to secure the advantages of globalisation, while protecting the local, the village, the community.

The system of Privy Council is a global system, well advanced in years and well advanced before its time. We ought not to be calling frenetically for globalisation, yet disband a working system of global justice. We ought not to hastily mess with the global without fixing the aborted, abysmal systems of local, village and community justice.
I was chatting with a senior inspector of police on Brian Lara Promenade two years after the Dana Seetahal assassination (in Trinidad).

He told me that this crime would only be solved if Government wants it to be solved. The inspector has a clear understanding of his role in the system. Not to shake the system, shake down the system, unless the Government says so. Not in kickback, a ganja find, cocaine in the orange juice, or assassination. Government remains the main obstacle to justice in the Caribbean. The Privy Council remains one of the key working parts of our justice system.
DR. WAYNE KUBLALSINGH