In April this year Chief Justice Bryan Sykes made what appeared at the time to be an innocuous, almost innocent statement that could easily have slipped the attention of all but the most vigilant or avid reader.

He told a Jamaica Information Service reporter that he was interested in building “the strategic thinking capabilities of judges and other officers of the courts to be better able to give input on matters of national importance”.

“We have to get our judiciary and our [officers] thinking in those terms, so when we hear, for example, Portmore is to become the 15th parish, as a judiciary, we have to think what that means.

“What is the likely population? What legal services are they likely to need? What size courts should be there? What types of cases are expected to be there, and so on, to begin to develop a plan so that if and when that becomes a reality, while the process is going on, we have our say as well,” Justice Sykes said.

In other words, the chief judge is not merely saying that court officers should be in a position to handle matters of national importance when it comes before them, but to be able to join the discussion process while “it is going on”, presumably in public.

This clearly is fraught with danger.

There is good reason members of the judiciary developed a tradition of not making public statements, except in the rarest of circumstances, maintaining a stiff upper lip so as to avoid conflicts of interest or prejudice when they might have to adjudicate on such public matters at a later date.

For example, at the rate things are going, the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) could well take the matter of the Portmore parish proposal before the courts, based on its well-known reservations.

It appears that Justice Sykes wants to break out of the tradition of judicial silence and is doing so in a rather stealthy manner. But for an industrious JIS journalist, we might not have discovered this propensity.

We note that he has also waded into troublesome waters by opposing the very reasonable proposal by the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) that the Emancipation and Independence celebrations be merged in the interest of promoting productivity.

Last Saturday he called for Jamaica to accede to the appellate jurisdiction of the regional Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), in his address to the Norman Manley Law School Class of 1984 at the S Hotel in Montego Bay, St James.

This is despite him knowing that there is important opposition to this proposal in many quarters of our nation and the region. Mr Sykes is very aware of the structural shortcomings of our justice system and has not been shy about pointing them out.

Here again, this is a matter that could wind its way to the courts, given the conflicting positions of the Government and the Opposition, not to mention civil society organisations who keep watch over our very flawed system of justice.

While such matters are being weighed by the nation, the chief justice should hold his peace, at least in public. The country must be able to have confidence in his impartiality.

Indeed, if we are right about Mr Sykes’ intentions to dispense with judicial caution, he owes it to the country to be more forthcoming in this respect.