Mr Keith Mitchell, the prime minister of Grenada, is clearly within his right to sue for libel anyone who he believes has wrongfully tarnished his reputation and good name.

As he did this week with a suit brought against the Grenada operations of the British-owned telecommunications company, Cable and Wireless. Subscribers to a Cable and Wireless bulletin board had repeated allegations made against Mr Mitchell which he considered to be defamatory.

We find it curious, though, that Mr Mitchell has chosen to bring a civil action for defamation against Cable and Wireless while the Grenada police has brought charges of criminal libel against a Miami-based online newsletter, OffshoreAlert and its publisher, Mr David Merchant, over the same set of allegations.

We are concerned, too, over the apparent zeal of the Grenada police to pursue charges of criminal libel for certain allegations made against the prime minister, and its seeming eagerness to detain Opposition politicians and journalists over these issues.

We have no reason to question the competence, impartiality and professionalism of the Grenadian police. Neither do we have cause to question the integrity of the Grenadian leader.

But both Mr Mitchell and the police, we suspect, will agree that recent responses to what the prime minister and the constabulary clearly deem to be unfair and damaging challenges to Mr Mitchell's reputation will raise reasonable questions about the selective use of the law, and whether criminal libel is not an anachronistic construct whose time should have long passed.

Indeed, the latter point is not a question only for Grenada but other Caribbean jurisdictions which maintain criminal defamation as part of their laws.
On the specific issues in Grenada, however, it is not unreasonable to speculate that Mr Mitchell chose to pursue a civil claim against Cable and Wireless for calculations that are more corporate and political than legal.

Many people are likely to argue that by going a civil route in this case, Mr Mitchell, from whom, in the circumstance, we cannot reasonably divorce his government, has removed any risk of an executive of a major corporate player facing a jail term if any official was held responsible for the company's action.

Indeed, Mr Mitchell would not be overly aggrieved if there was consternation and claims of partisan action by the police for their recent detention of three Opposition politicians on suspicion that they distributed material about the prime minister that was criminally libellous.

We would advise the Grenada police to be careful lest it undermines its reputation for impartiality and fairness. We would also urge the Grenadian government to retreat from what appears to be wilful use of the anachronism of criminal defamation, proffered against Mr George Worme and his Grenada Today newspaper in 1999, and now against OffshoreAlert and Mr Merchant.

Some may well claim that the use of this law is vengeful.
This newspaper believes that the maintenance of criminal defamation among regional laws is out-of-date and wrong. Such laws, we think, are incompatible with the constitutional rights of free speech and undermining of a fundamental tenet of democracy: the right of citizens to criticise their leaders.

We feel that existing civil laws of libel already provide far too much protection to public officials, who, unlike the rest of us, have the added rampart of criminal procedure which is open to abuse.
When politicians throw their hats in the ring, they must be ready for a rasping scrutiny and a diminished privacy. It is better to err on the side of openness than to risk any diminution of democracy.

Shaggy & Friends take a bow

Two-day Gathering of the Peacemaker in Negril

Patrons rang in the New Year with gusto at 11:59