A Jimmy Carter spot once misattributed the following to Abraham Lincoln: “A statesman thinks of the future generations, while a politician thinks of the coming elections.” We can only speculate about Kenny Anthony’s thoughts as he strode toward the podium to address the 46th Annual Convention of the St. Lucia Labour Party that had elected him, without opposition, to take it into the next general elections. The year was 1996.
He tellingly used Shakespeare as his launching pad: “In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility. But when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger, stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage!”
Is there even the remotest possibility he gave a passing thought to James Baldwin? James Baldwin who was one of the 20th Century’s greatest writers, renowned for his essays on the black experience in America, as far removed from A Midsummer Night’s Dream as fantasy is from reality. James Baldwin, who looked like us, that is to say, was black like us—and who, long before it was en vogue, when even to think it was downright dangerous, had taken every opportunity to shout: Black lives matter!
“People who shut their eyes to reality invite their own destruction,” he had warned. “And anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
Some may well have wondered: Was Kenny Anthony in 1996 a masked Judas behind a Jesus mask, preoccupied with achieving his political ambitions by whatever means necessary—including setting brother against brother? In hardly princely circumstances, he and his siblings had grown up with their uneducated mother on a plantation bequeathed to their father by his own father, an Englishman who arrived in enslaved Saint Lucia in the 1800s. By his own repeated telling, Anthony and his siblings had suffered the peculiar pains of poverty in the midst of plenty. That his Caucasian father was a wealthy plantation owner did not necessarily mean the born in Saltibus son came attached to a silver spoon. To raise the money for his school fees his unmarried mother was left little choice but to sell her son’s much beloved pet cow.
By the time he stepped on that earlier revisited Laborie podium, en route to the Office of the Prime Minister, he had already held several influential public sector positions that afforded him opportunities to sample the lives of the unaccountably rich and notorious, as well as up-close encounters with the destitute, on whose scarred scrawny backs the mostly white and prosperous had planted their luxury homes away from home.
If ever he had been in a state of innocence, clearly that innocence was long dead by the time he addressed the graduating class at the Norman Manley School of Law, in Jamaica. He began with a shocker: John Jay Chapman, an American writer especially remembered for his attacks on the get-rich-quick mentality of the post Civil War “gilded age,” had got it wrong when he declared “the world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.”
The visiting lecturer-prime minister disagreed. He preferred to believe “politicians are way ahead of the judicial and legal intelligentsia in matters of legal and police reform.” He acknowledged nevertheless that “throughout our region the perception of our judicial system was unflattering.”
On the other hand: “Some, ostensibly to disguise their anglophile convictions, their lack of belief in themselves and our societies, utilize the collective perceptions to justify their opposition to abolition of appeals to Privy Council. They argue that we must fix the problems before appeals to the Privy Council are abolished. At most, this argument is disingenuous. After all, the problems exist despite and in spite of the Privy Council. What I readily concede is that our failure to deal with our judicial problems has undermined confidence in the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice.”
The year was 2002. We may let fly the no-ball distinction between “despite and in spite.” But disingenuous? Anglophile convictions? What was so unusual about a people less concerned about outside world affairs than with conditions at their own broken doorsteps? If the people of Saint Lucia and the other islands of the OECS worried more about the daily dispensation of justice at home than about the judicial operations of the relatively recent Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice and the long-established Privy Council, did that automatically mark them unsophisticated? And if they should choose to stand by the devil they know, by which I mean the Privy Council, would that justify labeling them anglophiles unappreciative of their own?
A telling statistic: in close to seventeen years, only sixteen matters have come to the Privy Council from Saint Lucia. One per year. Which makes the august body seem next to irrelevant. At any rate, as far as a significant number of us are concerned. As I write, one matter has for almost two years been awaiting the special attention of our current court of last resort. The involved three parties are, as is usually the case, politicians; members of Saint Lucia’s parliament.
While Kenny Anthony would have us pursue justice through the CCJ instead of the Privy Council, during his lecture at the Manley Law School he also confirmed: “There is a deep-rooted belief that our judiciary has, to a large extent, not lived up to the expectations of our peoples. Some hold the view that our higher courts have betrayed our trust and confidence. Others point to the fact that cases take years to reach the courts and when they do the judiciary does not always deliver timely, reasoned and erudite judgments. Distrust of lawyers and judicial personnel is endemic and widespread. Some believe the criminal justice system is near collapse, assisted by inconsistent signals from magistrates and judges. Indeed, it is felt the courts are citadels of sympathy for criminals who commit outrageous crimes.”
You may by now be tempted to ask, fellow cross bearer, how did we arrive at this slippery road to Golgotha? If we can agree that in 2002 Prime Minister Kenny Anthony spoke only the whole truth about local justice, might we now also acknowledge the conditions he described are today indisputably worse? So much for the people’s attitude toward the CCJ being symptomatic of anglophile convictions and a learned self-hatred.
In January, at the virtual launch of the 2022 Law Year, the Director of Public Prosecutions Daasrean Greene thus bemoaned the shocking mess that is our nation’s justice system: “In the state of Saint Lucia. It is of great concern that the remand population at our correctional facility surpasses its penal. There are 327 persons on remand and 172 penal. There are over 90 individuals awaiting trial for murder while we struggle with finding appropriate housing for our courts.” Especially frightening was his revelation that since 2020 his office had prosecuted not a single murder case.
No surprise that the recurring nightmare had been exacerbated by COVID-19 protocols. Meanwhile, we the people were left to survive as best we could “the highest number of homicides in the island’s history.” The DPP was necessarily diplomatic and brief. He neglected to mention how long the 92 murder-accused had been on custodial remand. But citizens were only too aware of the several unresolved firearms-related homicides, at least three fatal stabbings at the Bordelais Correctional Center—rapes and other violent crimes.
The misadventures of the island’s only security force would be hilarious but for the bloody price paid in consequence. There have been public demonstrations by the attention-starved bereaved, desperate and bewildered relatives of homicide victims, among them a police officer’s wife who was shot dead in the head as she and their two young offspring prepared for bed in the absence of the man of the house. Then there was the 17-year-old schoolboy who, for still unexplained reasons, was fatally shot several months ago by the police during a mystery-shrouded car chase through the streets of Castries. The latest hot potato involves a 16-year-old the police claim had resisted arrest while armed with a toy gun. Among the more often repeated public complaints is the shared silence of successive administrations, the collective church and the island’s once garrulous non-governmental organizations.
Greater than ever is our distrust of local politicians and lawyers, many of whom are aspirants after political office or unabashed persistent campaigners for one of our two main political parties—never campaigners for an untainted cause. Almost on a daily basis our politicians engage with impunity in public behavior normally associated with alley cats in heat. As if desperate to confirm Cicero’s observations on the hypocritical nature of politicians, our election candidates continue to make outrageous promises to a gullible electorate that are forgotten the minute the polls have closed.
Over the last several years there has been hardly a House meeting when bellicose MPs did not openly accuse one another of egregious criminality, even money laundering, in the evidently meaningless presence of the Speaker. The French economist and journalist Frederick Bastiat comes to mind. “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in society,” he wrote, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it, and a moral code that glorifies it.”
Our lawmakers are demonstrably above all laws, answerable to no one for the admitted “failure to deal with our judicial problems that have undermined confidence in the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice.” Established in 2001, the CCJ is justifiably proud of its unblemished record. If indeed most of the region remains uncertain about the court, it is our politicians who alone must bear the blame.
It is they who allocate or withhold funds for the proper operation of Bordelais, the family court, the Boys Training Center at Massade, our police force, the offices of the attorney general and the DPP and other associated institutions. It is our politicians who determine the number and caliber of our judges and magistrates. The quality of justice dispensed to citizens is to a large extent dependent on how much our politicians invest in the system.
One of the proffered justifications for embracing the CCJ hinges on the higher cost of filing with the Privy Council. But local seekers of justice cannot afford representation even at our lowest courts. And considering just one case per year—usually filed by or against the state—is likely to come before our court of last resort, whether the Privy Council or the CCJ, is it any wonder the prevailing attitude is reminiscent of Clarke Gable as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind?: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”
The favorite tool of our fishers for ballots, otherwise known as campaigning politicians, is the race card, calculatedly laced with references to the enslavement of our ancestors, colonialism, differences in culture and skin tone and so on. Would the Privy Council operate to their satisfaction if every member was non-Caucasian? How familiar is the Privy Council with the cultures of the several countries it serves with little complaint, among them Brunei, Trinidad and Tobago, and Tuvalu? Where is the evidence that culture ever impacted a Privy Council decision?
To return to Kenny Anthony’s lecture at the Norman Manley Law School: “I am firmly of the view that our present perception of justice is too narrow and is a regrettable legacy of our past.” Additionally: “There must be no suggestion of impropriety. There must be full confidence that both sides, private and governmental, are given a fair and full hearing.”
Anthony went on. “Too often the perception is that the scales of justice may be unevenly weighed because of personalities. Or simply because government is a party to the litigation.” When recently the prime minister attended—with widely speculated partisan interest—a court matter involving a member of his Cabinet, he told media head hunters outside the courthouse his only interest was “to ensure justice was done.”
In a 2015 House address, then prime minister Kenny Anthony had served colleagues this reminder: “Not only do we have to get specified majorities to change provisions of our Constitution but we also have to include the people of Saint Lucia in the reform process because, for the most fundamental provision, they become part of the constitutional reform process, in the sense we are required to hold a referendum.”
On the remembered occasion he had also confessed: “I have fundamentally changed my views on some key provisions of the Constitution.” Among them were “the provisions governing the public service.” He hinted at the time that he would not place his government at risk by repeating the mistake of counterparts in the Bahamas and St. Vincent and the Grenadines that had held referendums on constitutional reform, with negative political fall-out for their parties. Since then, Philip J. Pierre has assumed the reins of power in Saint Lucia and by several reliable accounts is considering his own farewell speech to the Privy Council—possibly without a referendum. Reportedly his advisors have convinced him his 15-2 House majority is all the authority he needs, nothwithstanding that his party had received just over half the number of votes cast in the recent elections, in which only 50 percent of registered voters had bothered to exercise their franchise. The CCJ issue was never on the ballot. Meanwhile, the prime minister has promised to undertake repairs to our near criminal justice system, beginning with a sod-turning ceremony at the site on which he proposes some day to construct a new courthouse!
As usual writes a book and speaks to the issue in paragraph. Rick its 2022.????