Seaga, left, and Nicholson
THE JAMAICA Labour Party (JLP) will be stepping up the pressure for a referendum on the establishment of a Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), party leader Edward Seaga said yesterday.
Buoyed by his party's sweep of the Local Government elections on Thursday, Mr. Seaga said the JLP would not back down on its demands for a plebiscite.
"There is no doubt that our position has been strengthened and we see it as a fundamental issue to be addressed," he told The Sunday Gleaner.
However, Attorney-General A.J. Nicholson said Mr. Seaga was "way off the mark."
He said the Government's position was clear in two fundamental respects.
"First, we intend to abide by the constitutional arrangements which do not require us to have a referendum," he said.
Secondly, he insisted, no country that stopped appeals to the Privy Council has ever had a referendum to determine whether it should have continued or not.
"And the reason is simply this, you can't go deciding on a referendum on an institution whose continued existence you have no control over. Suppose we have a referendum and the majority vote is 'yes, we should stick with the Privy Council', and then two years later it is abandoned in the United Kingdom; where would that leave us?"
He said the Jamaica Labour Party was merely playing politics.
In an interview with The Sunday Gleaner, Mr. Seaga said the "powerful statement" sent to the Government in Thursday's election, required that it listens to the people.
But, Mr. Nicholson said, this was ironic.
"It's odd that Mr. Seaga should see the favourable outcome of a Local Government election as a mandate for national and regional issues, when he has been insisting that the same issue placed by both parties in their manifestos for national elections, should not be seen as giving a mandate when there is a different winner."
Mr. Seaga reiterated that he had already made a proposal to the Government which would allow for a compromise on the CCJ.
In a Parliamentary debate in May, he supported Jamaica's ratification of the agreement to establish the CCJ, but without making the regional court the country's final court of appeal.
AMENDMENT
His proposed amendment called for the retention of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as Jamaica's final appeal court for the next 10 years, after which the people of Jamaica would be asked to decide, by way of a referendum, if they wanted to change from the Privy Council to the CCJ.
Yesterday he suggested the establishment of the Caribbean Court has been further clouded by the uncertainty in Trinidad given that the Opposition United National Congress (UNC) had withdrawn its support.
"That leaves the Eastern Caribbean, Barbados and Jamaica. We are saying we can't leave the Patterson administration to do whatever it wants without consulting with the people," he said.
In a recent radio interview, Kamla Persaud-Bissassor, who served as attorney-general in the former UNC Government, said the Trinidad Opposition's objections stemmed from reservations about the independence of the justice administration system.
She said there were now concerns about "political" appointments to the CCJ.
SELECT JUDGES
Regional leaders have said, however, that a Regional Judicial Services Commission would select judges for the court to insulate the court from political interference.
The governments have also set up a trust fund that has been mandated to raise US$100 million for the financing of the court.
Trinidad and Tobago was among the first CARICOM states to sign on last year to the inter-governmental agreement for the creation of the CCJ. The others are Guyana, Barbados and St. Lucia.
On June 9, Jamaica's Prime Minister P.J. Patterson formally ratified the agreement for the establishment of the regional court.
