KINGSTON, Jamaica — Former Prime Minister PJ Patterson has asserted that the framers of Jamaica’s constitution never intended for the British Privy Council to remain as Jamaica’s highest Court of Appeal, hence it was never deeply entrenched in the constitutional framework.

Speaking at a forum at the Faculty of Law at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Patterson emphasised that both Norman Manley and Sir Alexander Bustamante had not subscribed to the “retention of an Apex Court created to maintain the cause of the British Empire, through which it would maintain its dominion by way of the Privy Council as the final determinant of our legal rights.”

Patterson, Jamaica’s sixth and longest-serving Prime Minister, had an insider’s perspective during the creation of the Jamaican constitution. He noted that with the dissolution of the West Indies Federation, the Federal Court would automatically be dissolved. As a temporary measure, it was decided to retain the Privy Council until a Final Caribbean Court could be established.

“Our founding fathers envisaged the establishment of a Caribbean Court at the apex. This should remain a settled national position and should not be subverted because of political expediency, which has now emerged as a partisan divide,” Patterson lamented.

“Not one single valid ground has been advanced as to why this vestigial colonial institution should remain,” Patterson declared. He argued that if Sir Alexander Bustamante was not convinced that it was a temporary measure, “he would have insisted on the deep entrenchment of the Privy Council”.

Patterson explained that the proposal to establish a Caribbean Court of Appeal originated from a recommendation by the Officers of the Caribbean Commonwealth Bar Association in 1970 and was approved at a meeting chaired by Jamaica’s Prime Minister Hugh Shearer.

In 1987 at a meeting of the Caribbean Heads of Government in Antigua attended by Jamaica’s Prime Minister Edward Seaga, it was reportedly decided by the Heads that in order to avoid the option of a mere transitional involvement of Caribbean jurists in the Privy Council, they would take immediate steps towards “the expeditious establishment of a Caribbean Court as the final Appellate Court for English speaking Caribbean countries”.

The meeting empowered the Regional Attorneys General, including Jamaica’s Ossie Harding, KC, to draft the framework for what is now the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).

Patterson explained that the Judicial Privy Council accepted that the final court would be simply entrenched, allowing its removal by a two-thirds vote of both houses, without requiring a referendum.

The former Prime Minister stressed the importance of not only establishing the CCJ but also ensuring it is seen as an itinerant court fashioned by the Caribbean people. He noted that Jamaica has paid its full share and that the Court has passed the ten-year test with flying jurisprudential colours.

“It is high time to remove the incongruity of His Majesty’s Judicial Privy Council being the final legal repository which interprets our Constitutional and fundamental rights when the Monarch is no longer even a figment of our social reality,” Patterson said.

“62 years after our independence, it is more than overdue for Jamaica to depend no longer on an Order in Council, to abolish the monarchy and to vest the judicial arm with the full authority to dispense justice for all; to develop a Caribbean jurisprudence,” Patterson said.