Strike one for an independent judiciary
FOR some time now I have been harping on how Trinidadians have come to take steelbands for granted even to the sorry point of not taking them on as I think they should. However there are things that Trinidadians do take for granted and the country is all the better and we all the happier for it.
I am referring here to our independent judiciary and I must confess that my mind would never even have focused on it had I not read the observations made in a “foreign” newspaper about the judgment delivered by Justice Peter Jamadar in what I have taken to calling the “Ken Gordon Libel Case”.
The paper was Jamaica’s Daily Observer in which, let it be said straight off the paper for which I work has an interest, and I say that not because that paper crowed over the substantial award Justice Jamadar handed down. In fact, it began with a warning somewhat akin to “when yuh neighbour’s house on fire wet yours:
“We took no pleasure in reporting the fact that Mr Basdeo Panday, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, was found guilty of slandering Mr Ken Gordon, the chairman of the Trinidad Express newspaper and a member of the board of the Observer.
Indeed, as a newspaper we have an instinctive concern about libel awards for the fact hat they tend, when substantial, to trigger often spurious claims against the press by the media’s version of ambulance-chasing lawyers. In the specific case, some might be tempted to claim a contradiction between Mr Gordon’s action, as an individual to seek redress for an injury, and his likely actions as a publisher of a newspaper against which similar claim may be made.”
The paper then went on to point out that all these “are issues worthy of debate” but “there are a few matters of fundamental importance in this ... judgment by the Trinidad and Tobago High Court in the person of Mr Justice Patrick Jamadar.
“In a perverse sense, Justice Jamadar’s ruling was a significant victory for a free press. It has removed a major psychological threat against the Trinidad and Tobago media by the government of that country.
To appreciate this point it is important to understand the context in which Prime Minister Panday, an Indo-Trinidadian, referred to Mr Ken Gordon, an Afro-Trinidadian, as a “pseudo-racist” at a function in 1997, to mark the anniversary of the arrival of Indians in that country.
Mr Gordon and the Express newspaper had led a campaign against a green paper by Mr Panday’s government proposing arrangements to punish the press when, in the view of the government, the press misbehaved. All this was in the wake of previous attacks on journalists of the Trinidad Guardian newspaper, including its former editor-in-chief, Jones P Madeira, whom the prime minister had also called a racist.
“The attack on Mr Gordon, notably at an event primarily of ethnic Indians, was, in our view, an attempt by Mr Panday at cowing the press into self-censorship, and, ultimately, acceptance of the government’s anti-press positions. Happily, the press was not intimidated.
“But perhaps the most powerful statement in Justice Jamadar’s ruling is its vindication of the independence of the Caribbean judiciary. There are many who have maligned the competence and integrity of Caribbean judges, suggesting that they are likely to be malleable to the wishes and whims of their governments.
“Justice Jamadar’s ruling ... are among many which declare the capacity of the region’s judges, even without the insulation of a wider regional system, to operate with integrity and, like the press, to be unbowed by the power of the executive and legislature.”
I found myself, yesterday, mulling over this editorial, the mind only now focusing on the fact that a judge had not only had the courage to rule against a sitting prime minister but to rule so severely. In fact, were I not writing about a judge and a prime minister I would have said he didn’t only tap him but he clouted him up.
Readers who have been reading me for some time, however, will know by now how my respect for protocol prevents me from descending to the coarseness of language that might otherwise have sufficed.
But to return to the substantive point, which is that it certainly never occurred to me (and, I daresay, Mr Panday as well) that Justice Jamadar would have bowed to prime ministerial power so much do I, like so many other Trinidadians, take the independence of the judiciary here for granted.
Sometimes, though, it takes a voice from outside to remind citizens of all the elements that are on the table, all the issues that are at stake, all the variables that seem to be at play.
Like the BBC voice that called to inquire, after the judgment had been handed down, whether the sitting judge was of the same race as the sitting prime minister. The answer to that is, of course, in the affirmative but it says a lot about the stature in which Trinidadians hold their judiciary that few, if any, ever felt that for Mr Gordon, that accident would have turned out to be a negative. Least of all, let me assure you, Mr Gordon. What do they think we are really running down here anyway? Some kind of a ripe fig republic?
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