Mickela Panday
The several Commissions of Enquiry (COE) set up under the People’s Partnership which enriched a select few brings to mind the famed epigram of French critic, journalist and novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “The more things change the more they stay the same.”
Our people have had enough of them. Beginning with the useless COE into the 1990 coup, where the chief witness refused to attend and which served no purpose but to tell us what we already knew—that our security and intelligence apparatus had been caught napping. Millions were spent on commissioners and lawyers, yet to date nothing has come of the report.
Then there was the Clico enquiry, presided over by Sir Anthony Colman, which the Prime Minister promptly sent to the DPP for guidance as to whether to release its finding. The DPP, who had tried to stop the enquiry because of its likely prejudice to the ongoing criminal investigation into the Clico collapse, advised that the report not be published. That hardly mattered to Commissioner Colman and the several English and local lawyers who were paid millions for a useless exercise.
As if that wasn’t enough, then came the revelation that the forensic audit into the Clico collapse had stalled because the auditors weren’t getting paid. How ironic the criminal investigation which justified the non-publication of the report that cost millions of taxpayers dollars, apparently has been stopped because the money has dried up.
The recent report of the enquiry into the failed HDC Las Alturas project was always seen as the most obviously political of the lot. Whilst one can say the Las Alturas enquiry hearings were dull, the report was far from so. It savaged former HDC chairman Calder Hart and former HDC CEO Noel Garcia.
In particular, Mr Garcia was pinned with responsibility for presiding over construction of two towers which had to be demolished. Mr Garcia was quick to point out that he had left the HDC before the two towers were built and indicated his intention to sue the commissioners personally. But it didn’t end there. The commission chairman, a former Court of Appeal judge, uncharacteristically sought to engage publicly with Mr Garcia. This was unseemly, to say the least.
Then suddenly the commission hastily delivered a Notice of Errata to the President which accepted that Mr Garcia wasn’t around when the towers were built. That error, and the timing of its correction.
That being said, none of this has done anything but further undermine confidence in our institutions, the administration of justice and, sadly, the legal profession. The public, weary of seeing attorneys earn millions in essentially futile exercises, has in the last few years seen an unhealthy reliance by politicians on legal opinions for political purposes.
You will recall, just weeks after becoming prime minister, when the present Opposition leader was accused of acting inappropriately by opting to stay at a contractor’s home, she sought exoneration by legal opinion, which was forthcoming.
So too did Mr Warner, when the Simmons enquiry in CONCACAF savaged him. No less than three senior counsel and a former Court of Appeal judge (now chairman of the Integrity Commission) panned that commission with legal opinions. Fast forward and now the present AG claims that, like others before him, he has received a “preliminary opinion” from a local senior counsel condemning the Las Alturas report. More recently, the Prime Minister himself sought and received a legal opinion from another senior counsel which describes the meeting between the President and the Minister of National Security (at the behest of the President) on security issues as inappropriate and improper. That we shall examine next week.
Inevitably, and regrettably, many have started to see lawyers as legal mercenaries, willing to opine in favour of their client for economic or other benefit. Whether justified or not, the legal profession is running the real risk of alienating the rest of society.
The Chief Justice’s speech at the opening of the Law Term in which he sought to avoid blame for the decline in the administration of criminal justice while at the same time announcing that he would continue to travel, did neither the judiciary nor respect for the law any good.
