KINGSTON, Jamaica, CMC – The Individuals’s Nationwide Social gathering (PNP) has pledged to make the Caribbean Courtroom of Justice (CCJ) Jamaica’s closing appellate Courtroom if it varieties the subsequent authorities, reigniting the nationwide debate over judicial sovereignty and constitutional reform.
Talking at a big public assembly at Musgrave Sq. in Brown’s City, St Ann, on Thursday night time, PNP President and Opposition Chief Mark Golding declared the occasion’s unwavering dedication to severing judicial ties with the UK-based Privy Council. The assembly marked the official presentation of the occasion’s 4 candidates for the parish and drew what observers described as a “huge crowd.”
Mark Golding, President of the Individuals’s Nationwide Social gathering (PNP)
Golding, who in January withdrew the PNP’s representatives from the Joint Choose Committee of Parliament reviewing the Structure (Modification) Republic Invoice, accused the ruling Jamaica Labour Social gathering (JLP) of stalling nationwide progress. He mentioned the JLP’s refusal to just accept the CCJ because the nation’s closing Courtroom, concurrently with strikes to take away the British Monarch as Head of State, was unacceptable.
“The time has come for full sovereignty,” Golding informed supporters. “Allow us to use the CCJ. The international locations within the Caribbean which might be doing nicely – Guyana, Barbados, St Lucia, Dominica, Belize – are all utilizing it. Their individuals have benefited from entry to justice.”
He criticised the Privy Council as an outdated and elitist establishment, far faraway from the realities of bizarre Jamaicans. “No one on this viewers can take a case to the Privy Council,” he argued. “It’s not an actual courtroom for Jamaica as a result of it’s important to be a multi-millionaire to take a case there, and it’s important to have a UK visa as nicely, which you don’t essentially have to get.”
Golding identified that the CCJ, established 20 years in the past, isn’t solely totally funded by way of a regional belief fund to which Jamaica contributes, but additionally insulated from political interference. “It has its regional judicial fee for the appointment of judges, which no politician in any island can intervene with,” he mentioned.
The PNP chief additionally famous the historic irony that it was a former JLP Prime Minister, Hugh Shearer, who first proposed a regional closing appellate courtroom within the early Seventies. “And but now dem a gi it a combat, it nuh mek nuh sense individuals,” he mentioned to cheers from the group. “We wish full sovereignty, we would like full independence, we would like decolonisation, and we would like it now. That’s what we stand for within the Individuals’s Nationwide Social gathering.”
