JUSTICE Minister Dorothy Lightbourne yesterday blamed partisan politics for the worsening of the nine-month-long stand-off between Jamaica and the United States over the contentious extradition request for former Tivoli Gardens don Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.

But even though she ended up signing the authority to proceed with the extradition against Coke, who is politically linked to her ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Lightbourne said she is still of the belief that the request was flawed in that it breached Coke’s constitutional rights.

“I signed,” Lightbourne said in reference to the authority to proceed signed in May last year, “but I do not resile from the belief that the request was flawed. What I was trying to do over all this period of time was to ask the United States Government to respect our constitution and our laws.”

At the same time, Lightbourne, who was giving evidence at the commission of enquiry into the Government’s handling of the extradition request, said she signed the authority to proceed with the extradition in the interest of the public as accorded by section 13 of the Constitution of Jamaica which provides that an individual’s right is subject to the public’s interest.

Lightbourne, who is also Jamaica’s attorney general, believed that the impasse could have been resolved earlier than the nine months it took — a period in which the otherwise friendly relationship between the United States and Jamaica took a battering — had politics not been involved.

“… Quite honestly, I think it could have been achieved, but the politics got into it and the public and everybody was churned up,” she said. “Otherwise, I think, we could have sat down, worked it out, removed the intercept evidence and the authority to proceed would have been signed.”

Though she did not say it, Lightbourne’s statement could be interpreted as a reference to the People’s National Party (PNP) getting involved in the matter. The PNP’s Dr Peter Phillips had claimed during a parliamentary sitting in March 2010 that the US law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips had been hired by the Government to lobby Washington on the extradition request which caused public backlash against the Government and calls for the resignation of Prime Minister Bruce Golding.

Further public pressure was placed on the Golding administration when it was revealed by the PNP that junior foreign minister Senator Dr Ronald Robinson had met in December 2009 with representatives of the law firm. Robinson resigned over the meeting, but told the enquiry that it was Golding who asked him to meet with the firm.

The JLP has maintained that it was it, and not the Government, that had hired the firm.

Yesterday, Lightbourne said during the first day of her much-anticipated appearance at the enquiry that her deputy, Solicitor General Douglas Leys, never told her before or after that a representative of the firm would be sitting in on a December 17, 2009 meeting between a Jamaican delegation sent to meet with officials from the US Justice Department in Washington. However, Leys previously testified before the enquiry to the contrary.

The December 17 meeting was scheduled to discuss what the Government of Jamaica was claiming to be flaws in the extradition request that breached Coke’s constitutional rights and Jamaica’s Interception of Communication Act. The breach of the act, according to Lightbourne, was made when information from Coke’s intercepted conversation in 2007 was passed on to US authorities.

Yesterday, while giving her evidence-in-chief under the guidance of her attorney Dr Lloyd Barnett and under the gaze of scores of JLP and PNP supporters as well as a handful of Government ministers, Lightbourne said that she would have signed the authority to proceed against Coke if the US had dropped the evidence gathered from the intercepted communication and sent additional information.

Lightbourne reiterated that she was merely trying to protect Coke’s constitutional rights and that she did not reject the extradition request.

But in a line that drew loud gasps, Lightbourne said that it was Coke who extradited himself by waiving his right to an extradition hearing in the Corporate Area Resident Magistrate’s Court last year June.

At the conclusion of yesterday’s sitting, the JLP supporters, most of them women, immediately gathered at the entrance of the Jamaica Conference Centre chanting party slogans and singing: “You wrong fi trouble Bruce Golding, you wrong.”

The enquiry continues on Monday with Lightbourne’s continued cross-examination by Queen’s Counsel Frank Phipps, who is representing the JLP.