CCJ welcomes St Lucia as full member of regional court docket
President of the Trinidad-based Caribbean Courtroom of Justice (CCJ), Justice Adrian Saunders, Tuesday welcomed St Lucia as a full member of the regional court docket that was established in 2001 to exchange the London-based Privy Council because the Caribbean’s closing court docket.
In an announcement, Justice Saunders stated that the CCJ, which has each an Authentic and Appellate jurisdiction, had taken word that the Structure of St Lucia (Modification) Act had been assented to by the Governor Normal, Errol Charles.
He stated in consequence, St Lucia has “now formally acceded to the CCJ’s Appellate Jurisdiction” extending his “sincerest congratulations to the individuals of St Lucia on this momentous event”.
St Lucia now turns into the fifth Caribbean Group (CARICOM) nation, becoming a member of Barbados, Dominica, Belize and Guyana, in turning into a full member of the CCJ, which additionally capabilities as a global tribunal decoding the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas that governments the 15-member regional integration grouping.
Whereas a lot of the CARICOM nations are signatories to the CCJ’s Authentic jurisdiction, Trinidad and Tobago, the place the CCJ is headquartered is amongst regional nations not full members of the court docket.
Justice Saunders stated statistics collated by the Courtroom in 2022 reveal that in every Caribbean state that has acceded to the CCJ’s appellate jurisdiction, “the quantity of instances being heard by that nation’s closing court docket yearly has at the least doubled, thereby contributing to the dynamism of the nation’s jurisprudence and significantly increasing entry to justice for its citizenry.
“Now we have little doubt that St Lucia too could have an identical expertise,” he added.
He stated that the Chief Justice of the Japanese Caribbean Supreme Courtroom, Dame Janice Pereira, and the President of the Saint Lucia Bar Affiliation, Diana Thomas Hunte, have been written to advising of the readiness of the CCJ’s Registry workers to help St Lucian court docket officers, litigants and counsel alike in using the CCJ’s digital submitting and case administration portals with a view to facilitate entry to the Courtroom.
“The CCJ seems ahead to serving the individuals of St Lucia as we do all of the states and other people of the Caribbean Group and specifically, these of Guyana, Barbados, Belize and the Commonwealth of Dominica, whose closing appeals we hear,” Justice Saunders stated, including “the CCJ seems ahead to extra CARICOM states accessing the CCJ’s Appellate Jurisdiction sooner or later”.