Dear Editor,

Not surprisingly, the Manatt/Dudus Commission of Enquiry has attracted a great deal of scepticism.

Among the most controversial points which define how the enquiry was conducted and how the commission’s findings will eventually be received by the public at large are the scope of its mandate; the way in which those terms were drafted; the choice of commissioners selected; the technical and legal aspects and political implications of the issues under investigation.

To begin with, we were off to a flawed start which degenerated into political hostility. It was flawed because a commission that was supposed to represent the public as a whole inevitably became a confrontation between the Opposition/People’s National Party and the Government/Jamaica Labour Party, with the citizenry as merely a concerned audience. That is an issue in itself, occasioned by the way in which the commission and its proceedings were structured and conducted.

The adversarial structure of the proceedings made it unlikely that the pertinent facts would be brought to light. After all, the lawyer’s first obligation is to protect his client. So even if the information sought would be useful to the commission, lawyers would fight tooth and nail to keep it out if it would compromise those whom they represent. Would it not have served the interest of truth better if the commissioners themselves examined the witnesses?

Some are asking if it really had to come to this. Should not good judgement have invoked, at the very outset, the discretionary powers of the minister’s office to issue the authority to proceed, and so refer the matter to the courts instead of waiting interminably for different, though not essentially better evidence? This is in the context of the gravity of the alleged offence, the reputed political connections of the accused, the credibility of the evidence against him, along with the threat to national security and actual impact on the level of crime in the country.

Severely prejudicing the commissioners’ work was the plausible presumption that public opinion in the main had already concluded that the GOJ/JLP improperly manipulated the extradition process to serve its own ends and then sought to mislead the nation with alternative legal/constitutional justifications. Bearing this in mind, the PNP/Opposition seems to have set out to reinforce what had become a firmly embedded popular conviction — regardless of the testimonies and the commission’s findings. In short, the public and not the commission was the jury to which the Opposition’s case had to be made.

This had to be the major emphasis since the case against the strictly legal defence was almost impossible to prove without specific factual evidence. In such a situation even valid circumstantial evidence would have to be very compelling in order to convince the commissioners to go along. But fortunately for the PNP/Opposition, even if there were firm legal grounds for the GOJ/JLP action, in the minds of the popular non-partisan majority, prosecution of an alleged gun-runner and narco-trafficker trumped even honest, firmly based constitutional niceties.

The commissioners’ task is an unenviable one. Hopefully, there will be no fatal dissonance between the commission’s findings on the one hand, and reasonable public perception on the other, as the pertinent questions will have been answered in a way that makes the enquiry worthwhile. The nation has already suffered more than enough torment.

H Dale Anderson

hdaleanderson@hotmail.com