GOVERNMENT is likely to request from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, a copy of the letter which it wrote to the Jamaican Government in April 2010 expressing its willingness to come to Jamaica to hear cases.

The action will, however, be only taken if Opposition Senator Marlene Malahoo-Forte does not submit a copy of the letter for which she has been suspended from the Senate for failing to produce after two requests from Senate President Floyd Morris.

“We are going to have to (request the letter from the Privy Council). This letter only came to my attention when the Observer published this ‘Privy Council Shocker’ thing on Wednesday,” Justice Minister Mark Golding told yesterday’s Jamaica House press briefing.

“The Government of the day that received that letter does not seem to have done anything about it. We have heard no arrangements being contemplated for the Privy Council to come and hear cases here. In fact, we were not aware of this letter [before],” Senator Golding said.

At the same time, he argued that the Privy Council is not an itinerant court and has only sat in specific jurisdictions under “ad hoc” arrangements that came at great costs to those Governments.

“It is not set up to sit outside the United Kingdom. The judges who sit on the Privy Council are largely the same judges who sit on the UK Supreme Court, and although it is true that they have occasionally sat outside of the UK — in Mauritius and the Bahamas — those were arrangements set up to hear particular matters, not to hear the entire list of cases that were before them. Whatever symbolic purpose they may have served it doesn’t constitute proper arrangements for access to justice from a final court. The CCJ is established to provide access to the people of the Caribbean,” Golding stated.

Senator Golding pointed out that the Government has, over the past five years, paid $207 million in solicitor fees to a British law firm to act as Privy Council agents to brief counsel; file papers; and other related activities on its behalf for cases that are heard in London.

“None of that was disclosed by either the Observer or Senator Malahoo Forte. But the fact is that the initiation of that letter appears to involve a firm that has a very strong financial interest in Jamaica remaining with the Privy Council,” he said.

The justice minister cited the filing fees for the Privy Council, which he said now range from $70,000 to close to $1 million, noting the CCJ has a flat fee of $7,500.

“This letter is a red herring,” he remarked, adding that “the Opposition needs to produce this letter without any further delay and I think it quite proper that Senator Malahoo Forte has been suspended from the Senate until she does so”.

He insisted that Senator Malahoo Forte had been disrespectful to the Senate for failing to produce the letter and sending a message to the president to adjourn the sitting, after he relayed a message to her to return to the chamber from a “lunch break”, to submit the document.

It was unclear whether the Government plans to go ahead with the debate given the threat of a boycott from the Opposition over the senator’s suspension. Opposition Leader Andrew Holness on the weekend demanded an apology stating that if the suspension is not immediately withdrawn, “the Government should not expect to see the Opposition Senators in Parliament.” (See Page 5)

Yesterday, Senator Nicholson chalked up the suspension as “nothingness”, pointing out that, “the suspension is until you (Malahoo-Forte) produce the letter. All she has to do is come to the next sitting of the Senate with it; you really wouldn’t have been suspended would you? I would advise the Opposition senators to return.”

The Bills before the Senate are the Caribbean Court of Justice Act (2012); the Judicature (Appellate Jurisdiction) (Amendment) Act (2012); and the Constitution (Amendment) (Caribbean Court of Justice) Act 2012. Passage of these pieces of legislation would see Jamaica adopting the CCJ as the country’s final appellate court and abandoning the Privy Council. So far, four of the Caribbean Community’s 15 member states — Belize, Barbados, Dominica, and Guyana — have replaced the Privy Council with the CCJ.