BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) — Barbados Attorney General, Dale Marshall, has called for regional cooperation to strengthen the criminal justice framework, particularly in the areas of witness protection and anti-gang legislation.

“For too many years we have approached our challenges in an insular and siloed way, when in truth and in fact, because of the commonality of our challenges, we really ought to be pooling our efforts,” Marshall told the audience attending the Pace Justice Second Attorneys-General Roundtable that ends on Friday.

“We don’t each need to reinvent the wheel. I can say, for example, that when we were looking at our witness protection legislation, which we passed only last year, Barbados found it extraordinarily beneficial…to look at the Jamaica model and…the St Vincent model. When we talked about gang legislation, we looked at the Jamaica model; in other areas, we’ve looked at the Trinidad model.”

Marshall said it was important for attorneys general and legal experts to gather in such sessions to chart the way forward. He pointed out that the region has a few roadmaps and listed them as including the Needham’s Point Declaration.

The Needham’s Point Declaration is a 2023 agreement comprising 39 recommendations to modernise and reform criminal justice systems across the Caribbean. Adopted on October 20, 2023, by the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) Academy for Law, it aims to improve efficiency, reduce delays and ensure victim-centred approaches through legislative, police and judicial reforms.

“Barbados has certainly leaned heavily on that roadmap,” Marshall said, adding that the various roadmaps had assisted the region in reforming its criminal justice systems.

“I believe sincerely that we are seeing significant progress. I speak on behalf of Barbados; we’ve benefited greatly from the input and the output of gatherings such as this. Last year, we talked about plea-bargaining legislation; Barbados now has plea-bargaining legislation.

“We also spoke about judge-alone trials; Barbados now has judge-alone trial legislation. We haven’t had that many judge-alone trials, and our system is one where it is optional; the defendant can opt in. But we’ve actually had important cases being done in that way,” Marshall explained.

The attorney general, in his brief remarks, said he is looking forward to the high-level discussions, saying “we’ll be looking at witness protection [and] …gang legislation, both of which are hot button issues for Barbados”.

Some of the topics to be discussed are harmonised justice: judge-alone trials, plea bargaining and legislative coherence; witness protection in the Caribbean: good practices, gaps and priority needs; digital justice and interoperability; and strengthening legal aid, public defender systems and criminal defence capacity.