Prime Minister PJ Patterson (left) and Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves heading towards yesterday's Caricom briefing at Jamaica House. (Photo: Michael Gordon)

BUOYED at having Jamaica formally ratifying the treaty to establish the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), key regional leaders signalled, yesterday, that they were preparing for a radical overhaul of the structure of the Caribbean Community when they meet for their annual summit in Montego Bay later this month.

"Today, we are on the verge of implementing the most ambitious form of economic union that it is possible to conceive," St Vincent and the Grenadines prime minister, Ralph Gonsalves, told journalists at a press conference in Kingston.

But Gonsalves insisted that the institutional machinery to manage this arrangement "despite its tremendous successes over the past 30 years... is not appropriate to the task at hand and in the circumstances of modern globalisation".

Caricom is a free trade and functional cooperation grouping among 12 English-speaking Caribbean states, plus Haiti and Suriname, and most of them have signed up to join a regional single market economy, which is to come into force by 2005. Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago and Barbados have said they would like to start a year earlier.

Analysts say the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) is perhaps the most ambitious regional integration effort outside the European Union (EU), but have harped, as Gonsalves did yesterday, on the fact that it has not implemented similar institutional arrangements to manage its affairs.

At their intercessional summit in Port-of-Spain in February, regional leaders assigned Gonsalves the job of working with other heads of government and technocrats to sift through a raft of recommendations and to draft a workable plan.

Gonsalves' proposals have not yet been made public, but they are expected to broadly mirror ideas put forward in a paper commissioned by Barbados, by a group of University of the West Indies political lecturers -- something of a hybrid of the EU system.

The EU is now considering changes which would overhaul their arrangements, but at present the EU is managed by a group of commissioners with supranational authority, who take broad policy directions from ministers and heads of government.

The Barbados paper suggested a smaller group of commissioners who would be in charge of implementation within the CSME, but with the existing Caricom Secretariat in charge of administration. Broad policy would be established by ministerial councils.

Gonsalves, Barbados' prime minister; Owen Arthur, who has responsibility for CSME implementation; and Jamaica's P J Patterson, who is the current chairman of Caricom; along with the community's secretary-general, Edwin Carrington, are believed to have discussed these issues in Kingston over the past two days ahead of preparing a final position to be presented to colleagues at the July summit.

None of the leaders spoke specifically, yesterday, of what was being placed on the table. But in February Patterson had hinted that reform, of the type balked at by Caricom leaders a decade ago when proposed by a group led by Sir Shridath Ramphal, may well be inevitable.

Yesterday the Jamaican leader again underlined the need for change.

"What I would like to see is the institutionalisation of those areas which are fundamental to the integration process and which will put Caricom on a sound and unshakable footing," the prime minister said.

"We have already indicated that we hope we can make a start in the implementation of the CSME," he added.

The CCJ, as well as replacing the UK-based Privy Council as the court of last resort for several Caribbean countries, will have original jurisdiction in interpreting the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas that initially established Caricom and will now cover the CSME.

Regional officials have stressed that the court is a critical dispute settlement mechanism for the functioning of the CSME, although in Jamaica and a few other countries the CCJ has been a controversial issue.

The Opposition and some human rights groups are against the court.

But Gonsalves yesterday said that the court would be "central" to the function of CSME institutions while Carrington called it "a central brick" in integration efforts.

Carrington said the court's inaugural session would be this November.

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