LETTER OF THE DAY: Justice for the common man
published: Saturday | March 1, 2003
THE EDITOR, Sir: THE CIVIL Procedure Rules came into effect on January 1, 2003. The rules govern proceedings in the Supreme Court of Judicature of Jamaica and they are one big step in the right direction. The Act seeks to eliminate time-wasting, to always espouse the overriding objective of justice for all litigants and to effect and encourage settlement and honesty.
The Act puts the responsibility for case management squarely in the purview of the judges, and penalise not just parties but attorneys who deliberately obfuscate, pussy-foot, bamboozle and jettison the cause of justice to the benefit of their client. My main concern is that the Resident Magistrate's Court rules have not been updated in a similar and progressive manner.
This should be done speedily as it is in the Resident Magistrate's Court that most time-wasting chicanery, obfuscating, intimidation and injustice is penetrated on the common man.
It is these courts that papers are lost, hidden, stolen and destroyed with impunity. It is in these courts that under-represented, frustrated and inadequate persons are routinely, brow-beaten intimated, tricked, ambushed and frustrated by the justice system in general. It is in these courts that the common man has to wait one whole day, for several days, for umpteen years just to be told to return another time.
I therefore call on the powers that be - the Government, the Opposition, the Chief Justice, the Human Rights Organisation and The Jamaican Bar Association - to act post-haste to remedy the situation.
After all, poor people suing for $250,000 maximum are humans too. They should not be left out in the cold by the judicial reform, which has catapulted our Supreme Court proceedings into the 21st century, thus creating a further fatal devastating hiatus between the privileged and the under-privileged Jamaican.
