Senior Counsel says dropping Privy Council is 'profoundly misguided'

Frank Solomon, SC

A prominent Senior Counsel has slammed the government's proposal to move away from the Privy Council in favour of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as Trinidad & Tobago's final court of appeal in criminal matters, calling it "appalling".

There are conflicting views on the subject. 

The government has said there is enough precedent in the Commonwealth to make the gradual move away from the Privy Council. 

The Congress of the People (COP) wants a referendum on the matter and the opposition is saying it would support the measure only if the government goes all the way and makes a complete break.

That view is shared by Michael de la Bastide, a former Chief Justice and the first president of the CCJ. 

In an interview with Ira Mathur, de la Bastide said: "I think they should go the whole hog. The problem is if you start channelling constitutional cases, criminal to the CCJ, civil to the Privy Council, in two directions to two final courts, there is the risk that there may be inconsistency in the decisions they produce".

De la Bastide also said there is no need for a referendum. In a statement to the Express newspaper, Senior Counsel Frank Solomon said he agrees with that. However he said he considers the move away from the Privy Council to be "appalling".

"Solomon said the plan to abolish appeals to the Privy Council "is profoundly misguided, and is fuelled largely by political ambitiousness and expediency and a willingness cynically to reignite and exploit obsolete anti-colonial sentiments and latent racism." 

His statement added, "The Privy Council is no longer merely the custodian of the last word in antique English law. It has become a window through which the freshness and variety of contemporary European philosophy freely blows in. 

"By removing the Privy Council from our system we are depriving our jurisprudence of vital infusions of nourishment in many aspects of modern legal thinking particularly in the areas of human rights and civil liberties, and we risk thereby, in our sovereign petulance, to encase ourselves in a shell of parochial, inward-looking, neurotic, politically supervised rudderless chaos."

Solomon said, "We are no longer a colony. We are now an independent sovereign nation. The power to decide to cut ties with the Privy Council is obviously an attribute of our independence, but it is equally an act of our independence to decide not to exercise that power. 

"Sound nation building does not require the repudiation of our past, it requires us to build upon it , selectively of course, and intelligently. We should remember the origins of Magna Carta, and what a gift it is to us and the western world and remember that is was the blood of others, not ours, that was shed for the freedoms that we enjoy.

"I could go on and on and on, about the wrong headedness of this appalling decision... about the spuriousness of the CCJ and its foundations of clay, of all the good reasons why the West Indies Federation was inevitably stillborn, of the ineluctable decline of the West Indies cricket team, of the struggle for survival of UWI, and the enforced diminution of its academic standards. I could question why the government, (whether PNM or UNC) retains so many English QCs for its big matters..."