Get a grip on CCJ

By Michelle Nurse Last updated Dec 16, 2014

It is unfortunate that opponents to Jamaica’s accession to the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) perpetrate and perpetuate myths about the malleability of the CCJ and constitutional protection enjoyed by the United Kingdom-based Privy Council, which it would replace as this country’s court of last resort. Not even the Privy Council believes this.

Indeed, in their 2004 ruling in which they held as unconstitutional the process by which the then Jamaican Government sought to install the CCJ into the Jamaican Constitution, the Privy Council judges readily conceded that their court enjoyed only limited protection in that it could be easily removed.

Said Lord Bingham of Cornhill at Paragraph 16 of that judgment: “As already recorded, Dr [Lloyd] Barnett for the appellants accepts in argument that Section 110 of the Constitution, providing for appeal to the Privy Council, could have been repealed by the votes of a majority of members of each House, since that section is not entrenched. The result would have been to constitute the Court of Appeal [of Jamaica] as the ultimate appellate tribunal in and for Jamaica.”