ATTORNEY-General, Senator A J Nicholson hopes the recent “strong endorsement” by head of the Organisation of American States (OAS) for the proposed Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) will bring opponents of a regional appellate court on board.

Nicholson said the comments from the OAS secretary-general, Cesar Gaviria, brought a “hemispheric perspective” to the debate over the establishment of a regional appellate court and he reiterated the Patterson administration’s intention to put the matter before the Jamaican people in parliamentary elections due by year-end.

“The work of the head of the Oganisation of American States enjoins him to bring to his task a hemispheric perspective. His strong endorsement of the proposal for the Caribbean Court of Justice to be established should be examined in that light,” Nicholson told the Sunday Observer last Friday.

According to Nicholson, the endorsement by the OAS head is based on the fact of “regionalism (being) a characteristic of the present global economic configuration”. “Not least also are the inevitable moves to be part of the Free Trade Area of the Americas which is due to come on stream by the first month of 2005,” he noted.

Debate on the CCJ in Jamaica over the past two years has not focussed much on the implication for trade under the impending Caribbean Single Market and Economy. Much of the debate has centred on the replacement of the United Kingdom Privy Council with a regional court of appeal that critics charged would be more sympathetic to capital punishment.

Caribbean governments have complained that the ruling by the UK body on the Pratt and Morgan case in the 1990s has effectively abolished capital punishment in the English-speaking Caribbean. The Privy Council stated that death row prisoners must be executed within a specified period of time, failing which their sentence should be communed to life imprisonment.

In addition, the Jamaica Labour Party, the Jamaica Bar Association and human rights advocates argued that the local system of justice required significant improvements before the country should expend resources in joining a regional court.

But Gaviria told a conference on constitutional reform in Barbados a week ago that the proposed regional court of appeal could help strengthen the judiciary, increase respect for human rights and, thus, enhance democracy in the region. And he noted that constitutional reform could not occur in one Caribbean country without factoring in the “economics and politics of the region on a whole”.

“Such an endorsement by the secretary-general,” Nicholson said, “should then spur those who continue to inveigh against the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice to come out of their entrapment by reluctance of their part to let go of what remains of our colonial trappings.”

“…And (they should) take the leap forward of establishing for ourselves an institution of our final court of appeal within our own regional sphere of influence,” he added.

During the raging debate which took place in 2000, the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party and the Jamaica Bar Association called on the government to consult the populace by holding a referendum, the results of which would not be binding, since the Jamaican Constitution does not require a plebiscite for the country to withdraw from the Privy Council. To do so requires a simple majority vote in both houses of Parliament.

However, as an apparent compromise to the pro-referendum camp, Prime Minister P J Patterson indicated then that he would include the matter of replacing the Privy Council with the CCJ among a package of issues his administration would be putting before the electorate during a general election.

“The prime minister has stated that a call for a referendum on whether we should remain with the Privy council or establish a CCJ, has placed (the issue) squarely in the political arena,” Nicholson pointed out. “…This will form part of the issues to be discussed in the election campaign and as such will be part of the manifesto going forward.”

In the meanwhile the administration, he said, would, at least, have to place the financial protocol relating to the CCJ, which is almost ready, before the public and parliament of Jamaica.

Nicholson, who has been the administration’s point man on promoting the establishment of the CCJ, promised the Upper House during the debate in 2000 that government would furnish detailed plans on the method of financing the regional court in a sustainable way, before Parliament was asked to ratify the agreement for Jamaica to become a member of the CCJ. The prime minister signed the agreement early last year.