MONTEGO BAY, St James — An attorney- at-law whose background includes a stint at the Titles Office and the role of a land tenure specialist has called for a court dedicated to land matters, pointing to severe judicial backlog and a critical lack of specialised expertise among judges handling property disputes.

“The reality is that a lot of our judges are not well-versed in land law. Many of them have come out of the DPP’s (Director of Public Prosecution’s) office; they have a criminal background. We find that the land matters are taking too long, and there are just too many land matters. Land is crucial to Jamaicans. So we need to do something. I think a specialist land court, like how we have a traffic court, a gun court — we need a land court,” said Gloria Brown, a senior partner in the firm Brown, Finlay and Company.

She was speaking with reporters after Monday’s presentation at the World Habitat Day Conference, held at S Hotel Montego Bay under the theme ‘The Struggle for Land, Shelter and Sustainable Communities’.

Land matters are now spread across the parish and supreme courts as well as the National Land Agency (NLA).

Issues such as disputes over ownership, disagreements over boundaries, ejection of squatters and easements are handled at the parish court level.

The civil division of the Supreme Court is where litigation in high-value property cases, complex vesting orders and major amendments of cancellations to titles are done.

Meanwhile, the National Land Agency manages registration and titling. This is not the first time a call has been made for a change in this approach.

In October 2010, while providing an update in the House of Representatives on the progress of land titling and registration under the Land Administration and Management Programme (LAMP), then Prime Minister Bruce Golding pointed to delays in the courts, noting that it takes close to a year to resolve matters dealing with the probate of Letters of Administration, or boundary or ownership disputes.

Golding said, then, that as part of the solution to address the backlog, the NLA had recommended the establishment of a land court for each county.

Golding also expressed a willingness to consider the appointment of a full-time paralegal and deputy registrar in the Supreme Court to deal with LAMP matters. There has been little reported on the issue since then.

Brown is a former project director at LAMP where she spearheaded the drafting and eventual passing of the Land Tenure Clarification Act, which sets the legal framework for the programme’s operations.

She left LAMP in 2010 to start her own law firm. On Monday, Brown said she and her team frequently encounter significant knowledge gaps when dealing with property litigation.

“It’s one of the most ignorant sets of individuals I’ve had to deal with in terms of the lack of knowledge in relation to land,” argued Brown.

One critical area to which she wants more Jamaicans to pay attention is the historical naming of locations and the associated environmental risks. “When you go into a community and somebody tells you that’s ‘Big Pond’, ask why it’s called that name.

Look at the places where we have had problems — Black River, Harbour View, Big Pond, Great Pond — those names were not just given by coincidence; they were given because of the history of the property,” warned Brown.

“We need to look at the history, because many of us have known the folklore. My parents always said, ‘The river will come back to take its course’.

We need to look at some of these areas, because we have the technology now where we know places that are not environmentally [friendly], competent to house persons’ dwellings, etc.

“We should learn from [Hurricane] Melissa. Melissa has taught us quite a bit… Look at Harbour View. We’ve had so many problems there whenever there’s a hurricane,” argued the attorney-at-law. Turning her attention to the issue of informal settlements, Brown warned that piecemeal approaches will only worsen the crisis.

“There are many, many solutions that we can look at. We can look at what was there for Operation Pride; we can look at the sites and services situation; we can look at the LAMP programme. But we need to bring all these things together. We have been too piecemeal in our approach to land, and this cannot continue. We have to solve this situation or else we’re going to have a Cooper’s Pen [Trelawny] multiplying all over Jamaica, because there’s something that God is not making any more of, and that is land,” argued Brown.

Her Cooper’s Pen reference was to a decades-old land dispute that culminated in roughly 20 houses in Trelawny being demolished in a pre-dawn operation on August 11.

Fresh eviction and cease-and-desist notices have since sparked days of protests.

Noting that illegal construction does not happen overnight, Brown highlighted the crucial role of local authorities in enforcement.

“Where are the planners? Where are the people whose job it is to go and enforce? Why is it that we only enforce when there is a problem? Because a man did not put up a three-storey building overnight, the people who work at the parish council (municipal corporation), many of them live in the same communities. I’ve seen so many clients who have gone to the parish council to say: ‘Somebody is building on my land’ they go and nothing is done. We need to know what exactly the parish councils are doing in terms of enforcement,” the attorney urged.

While acknowledging that squatting will persist, Brown warned that systemic failures could lead to civil unrest.

“When you have these problems like this, you’re going to have another Morant Bay Rebellion, maybe in another 10, 20 years, because Jamaicans are not going to continue where we see a lot of persons — the big hotels are coming to take away the beach properties, while the marginalised — we don’t have even marginal lands again,” she said.

Brown predicted that the construction of highways will open up interior sections of the country for those seeking to own land.

“It’s not the needy who are going to be succeeding; it’s going to be the greedy,” she argued.