BELIZE’S prime minister, Said Musa, has suggested that the use of video-conference technology in Caribbean courts could be one way of limiting the intimidation of witnesses in criminal cases.

But at the same time, Musa stressed that among the most critical challenges faced by the region’s judicial system was making it more accessible and transparent to ordinary citizens.

“We have to find meaningful ways of making the laws and legal system open and accessible to our people,” Musa said in a speech Saturday night at a graduation ceremony for lawyers at the Norman Manley Law School at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies.

Musa, a lawyer himself and with a son, Kareem, in the graduating batch, framed his speech in the context of changing international jurisprudence, including the move to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), and the impact of technology in the practice of law.

For instance, Musa noted the use of the Internet for legal research, the availability of a community legal service website in the UK to offer help to people and a Technology Court in Singapore, through which documents are filed electronically and evidence presented and recorded through video-conferencing facilities.

The use of video-conferencing facilities could be useful in regional courtrooms, he said.

“There is a region-wide feeling that witness and victim intimidation and harassment are seriously undermining our criminal justice system,” Musa said. “This results in many cases for the prosecution falling apart or even failing to get off the ground.”

“If victims and witnesses feel confident that they will be able to give evidence and be cross-examined from an undisclosed location via video-conferencing, without having to face the accused persons in court, this would provide a useful boost to a Caribbean criminal justice system that is in dire need of re-balancing,” he added.

But even if such technological advances were to come to Caribbean courts, the Belizean prime minister suggested, access to the courts remained a pressing issue.

“The challenge is to make the legal system and its processes accessible in a transparent, efficient and economical way to the majority of our citizens,” he said. “At present, too many of our citizens lack access to basic legal information and advice and cannot afford to enforce their rights, or resolve their disputes in the courts.”

Musa raised the relevance of expanding human rights to ordinary citizens if they neither understand them nor can afford to enforce them.

He said: “How relevant to our ordinary citizen is the powerful tool of judicial review in ensuring governmental decisions comply with law if only big corporations and well-financed NGOs can afford to test government decisions in court?”

Musa also touched on the CCJ — the proposed final court of appeal for several Commonwealth Caribbean jurisdictions — and its likely role in “the development of our jurisprudence” as well as the “increasing internationalisation of the law”, with domestic implications.

“It would be a mistake to think that the fact of sovereign, independent statehood means we can carry on practicing law in our respective countries oblivious to what is happening regionally and in the world around us,” Musa said.