THE EDITOR, Madam:
My young colleague and friend, Daniel Thwaites, in his article on the Privy Council in your issue of the 16th inst. accused the Bar Association of having decided on a wretched course of action (in regard to the CCJ). In the past, he says, it (the Bar Association) used to advocate for, and wholeheartedly support, the establishment of a Caribbean Court. From this he concludes that the Bar's present position on the CCJ is cowardly, declaiming support while raising every possible barrier and objection to its formation under the neatly bureaucratic banners of endless consultation and procedure.
Responsible journalism demands that one checks one's facts before asserting them, especially when using them to make such sweeping condemnation of a responsible professional body. Where does Mr. Thwaites get his information that the Jamaican Bar Association has ever advocated for and wholeheartedly supported the establishment of a Caribbean Court? (Not that it is necessarily opposed to one now, as Mr. Thwaites is at pains to suggest).
I have been a member of every Bar Council, but one, since being admitted to practice in 1961 and I have no recollection of any Bar Association, before or after Fusion in 1972, which has, before now, ever taken an overt and collective position on the establishment of a Caribbean Court or in which the issue has even been extensively discussed. Government spokesmen have dredged up the fact that a committee of OCCBA, back in about 1972, had recommended the establishment of a Caribbean Court to replace the Privy Council in relation to appeals, and have gradually distorted this fact into the false notion that at sometime in the past the Jamaican Bar Association has either advocated or supported the establishment of a Caribbean Court to replace the Privy Council until it has now reached the proportions given it in Mr. Thwaites' article. It is simply not true.
Mr. Thwaites is entitled to his own views as to the present efforts of Caribbean Governments to disengage from the Privy Council and replace it with the CCJ, even if, as I suspect, his views are coloured by his felt need to be in step with the views of the leadership of the political party of his choice.
At the same time his critical position in relation to the views held by the overwhelming majority of lawyers in private practice probably suffers from the fact that he has not himself practised at the bar. My sole concern in writing this letter, however, is to insist that the premises upon which such an emphatic denunciation is made of the position in which I have participated and wholeheartedly support are, at least, historically accurate.
I am etc,
DENNIS V. DALY
E-mail: dvdaly@jol.com.jm
