MONTEGO BAY, St James — In a continued call for Jamaica to embrace the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as its final court of appeal, Chief Justice Bryan Sykes is urging lawyers to present factual evidence that will sway naysayers or the undecided. The move away from the United Kingdom Privy Council, he said, is inevitable.

He framed his most recent call within the context of Heritage Week and what it symbolises in moving away from the colonial past.

Speaking in Montego Bay last Saturday during a dinner celebrating the 40th anniversary of the graduating law class of 1984 out of Cave Hill, Barbados, Sykes urged the group to use its power to push for the CCJ.

“What you can do is begin to use the positions of influence that you have to educate persons about the court,” he urged the gathering at S Hotel, which included Jamaica’s first woman Director of Public Prosecutions Paula Llewellyn.

“Speak more about the court, publicly, whenever you get the opportunity to speak — not anecdotal evidence but factual evidence about the court so that persons can understand how the court was established, how it operates, its decision making and the quality of its judgments; because at some point, the delinking has to come,” he reiterated.

Sykes argued that the CCJ is “the natural and inevitable endpoint of a system of West Indian legal education”.

The chief justice hammered home his point that, in order to achieve full decolonisation, the justice system has to move away from the Privy Council. He lamented the tendency to hold on to remnants of the past.

“A large part of it, I suspect, is one of the consequences of colonialism. It undermines your self-confidence and undermines your self-belief,” Sykes said.

Jamaica’s final appellate court remains the Privy Council despite a 2015 vote in the country’s House of Representatives to have the CCJ, headquartered in Trinidad, play this role. As it presses for constitutional reform, the Jamaica Labour Party-led Administration has mooted a phased approach to removing the British monarch as the country’s head of State and moving to the CCJ. The Opposition People’s National Party wants both steps taken in tandem.

During last Saturday’s event, Sykes pointed to the contradiction of a country that has produced such impressive individuals yet is still too timid to move away from reliance on the Privy Council.

“That is why I began by making reference to Nanny, Sam Sharpe, Arthur Wint and Bob Marley. So, here it is, the country that has produced these persons — and I have not forgotten Marcus Mosiah Garvey — still is diffident about making the Caribbean Court of Justice our final appellate court,” the chief justice lamented.

He pointed out that, under the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, the CCJ is the final court for signatories’ economic affairs “and yet we have a difficulty embracing it as our final appellate court for civil and criminal matters”.

Added Sykes, “We have our colleagues here from Barbados, from Belize and they have embraced the Caribbean Court of Justice without the agony that seems to be engulfing us here in Jamaica.”

He also used the opportunity to again respond to often-raised objections to the CCJ being Jamaica’s final court of appeal.

“What I can say, without getting into the details of it, is that the court is a well-run court; not a perfect court by any means, but is a well-run institution. And so there is no reason why persons should not have confidence in the court. If we are talking about jurisprudence, the court has produced at least 15 years’ work of cases for persons to analyse,” said Sykes.

“The critics of the court have not publicly said that the jurisprudence in any way is defective or deficient. You might not agree with all the decisions that it gives, and that is understandable, but there is nothing to say that the work is of poor quality,” he continued.

He suggested that critics educate themselves.

“I’m sure that most of the critics have never read any of the reports because if they read the reports, they could not say some of the things that they say,” argued Sykes.

He also rejected suggestions that the CCJ’s judges will be less objective than those who sit on the Privy Council.

“The argument has been made that the judges there will be subject to influence from politicians; that has been said. The court has been around for almost 20 years, where is the evidence of that? And so the question then arises, ‘Why is it that among some of the intelligent here in Jamaica, including lawyers, there is this reluctance to join the court?’” he queried.