Party leader wants justice
Leader of the Barbados Labour Party (BLP), Mia Mottley, expressing concern about the slowly moving wheels of justice in this country, is promising to address that issue head-on if elected to office.
Speaking at St. Patrick’s, Christ Church on Sunday night, Mottley told those gathered that the backlog of criminal cases in the court system is one of the major issues addressed in their recently launched manifesto, such that they are proposing to appoint two new judges. Her comments came as she contended that no more than nine months should pass between laying a charge and the first hearing, six months for first appeal and another six months for the second appeal.
She spoke to this as she criticised Prime Minister Freundel Stuart for the Democratic Labour Party’s plan for Barbados to leave the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) if re-elected. Questioning who PM Stuart consulted on the matter, she contended that it is not a move that the BLP would support. Mottley, a former Attorney General, said the suggestion to leave the CCJ is simply because the Prime Minister does not like the decisions handed down by the court. She went on to suggest that it was also connected with the recent ruling concerning the right of Commonwealth citizens to vote, a claim that PM Stuart has refuted.
“Can you imagine that you have these judgements at first instance, at the Court of Appeal; you mean you still had to move the Caribbean Court of Justice last Sunday morning? The mere fact that a court outside of Barbados, in Trinidad, the final court of Barbados, but it meet on a Sunday morning 11 o’clock, what that tell you? It’s urgent; they recognise it is critical. You get a decision you didn’t like and by the next weekend you talking bout you gine pull Barbados out of the Caribbean Court of Justice,” she said.
Speaking one day before Mottley, at a meeting on Saturday night at Eagle Hall, PM Stuart, as he first raised the CCJ de-linking intention, maintained that if it were the first time he had raised the concern, it could be argued it was because of the voting issue. However, he contended that having talked about it months ago, stating that he was “unhappy with the virtual slanders that were hurled at Barbados through that court”, meant no one could question his “bona fides or credibility on this issue”.
Meanwhile, on the issue of court backlogs and lengthy remands, Mottley said the criticism of Barbados by the CCJ is no different from the thinking of every other major court in the world.
“It is now recognised that that is a major breach of human rights. A man in our country is presumed innocent and when you keep a man on remand for three, four and five years, sometimes longer than the sentence he would got to spend, or near as long as the sentence, it is wrong,” she said.