PRIME Minister of Antigua, Mr. Gaston Brown, has made an awful statement on why his country is not ready to have the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as its final court. No matter how the commentator wants to observe protocol and use appropriate language to disagree with the reasons for Antigua not wanting to join the CCJ at this moment, it is impossible to restrain oneself. Mr Brown’s remark was nonsensical and silly and makes no sense at all.
He offered two reasons and both border on analytical stupidity. The first one is that the Privy Council provides distance and anonymity, so there cannot be attempts at regional interference in the court. This statement is devoid of logic and commonsense.
If you are going to argue that it is best to have judges far away from the local milieu so that they cannot be reached by those in the local society, then how can any country have a judiciary? If you follow Brown’s logic, then no country should have its court based in the country itself because local interference is possible.
The commonsensical question is if judges of the CCJ can be reached even though they sit in Trinidad away from the other CARICOM nations, then by the same logic the High Court judges in every country can be contacted because they live in the nation over whose laws they preside.
The obvious question to ask is how valid then is the functionalism of the High Court in each CARICOM nation and the appeal courts in those nations? After all, if you follow Mr Brown’s logic, then local interference can occur. Is there a High Court in Antigua, and if there is Mr. Brown should quickly remove it to  far places such as Iceland or Lesotho, so there can be no interference.
In all my experience on earth, I have never heard a more absurd set of words from a Caribbean Prime Minister than those mouthed off by Mr Brown last week. I don’t see how he can maintain his credibility among CARICOM Heads after that outrageous descent into irrational thinking.
Does Mr Brown know that it takes longer for a majority of CARICOM nationals to reach Trinidad, the seat of the CCJ, than for Europeans to get to the final court in Europe – the European Court of Human Rights based in France? It takes four times the hours for some CARICOM citizens to reach Trinidad than Europeans citizens from Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, etc., to land in France.
It takes four times the hours for some CARICOM citizens to reach Trinidad than many states in the US to reach Washington, DC, where the highest American court is located. The point is distance is not a factor in the location of a country’s highest court, so Mr Brown has no point at all when it comes to the reason for distance.
The second factor he offered for choosing the Privy Council is that the CCJ has not reached the level of maturity to satisfy the people of Antigua. I wonder if this is a Freudian slip and that he actually means that it is Antigua that has not reached any level of maturity to participate as an independent country at the UN and in CARICOM.
Let’s look at the statistics. Antigua is 108 square miles with about 90,000 souls. It has no discernible natural resources, and it is one of the weakest economies in CARICOM. It relied on online gambling to sustain itself, but the US sanctioned it for having such an industry. Another form of income is selling citizenship to foreigners if they invest in the island. The EU is about to clamp sanctions on Antigua and three more CARICOM islands for that policy. Antigua is not a competitive tourist destination compared to Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas and Trinidad.
Against these facts, how can Brown say that the CCJ is not mature enough to be accepted by Antiguans as their final court? A cynic can argue that Antigua itself has not reached the status of a country to have the same vote as other countries in the UN and OAS. If the people of Guyana, Barbados, Belize and St. Vincent can accept the CCJ as their final court, then these nations are not as intellectually strong as Antigua because one must remember what its Prime Minister has said – that Antigua has standards so high that the CCJ is not mature enough to warrant acceptance as their final court. I heard that an American billionaire once tried to buy Antigua. One day he may succeed and become the only judge on the island.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.