Trinidad Chief Justice rebukes detractors

(Trinidad Guardian) Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie came out swing­ing against ‘lo­cal de­trac­tors’ at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the Fam­i­ly Court, Calder Hall, To­ba­go, yesterday.

This comes one day af­ter the Law As­so­ci­a­tion filed a law­suit against Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley for his re­fusal to in­ves­ti­gate the CJ’s al­leged mis­con­duct, while in of­fice. They want the prime min­is­ter to re­view the mat­ter.

Ad­dress­ing the gath­er­ing, the Chief Jus­tice likened the law­suit to Trop­i­cal Storm Karen’s dev­as­tat­ing ef­fect on To­ba­go.

“The ju­di­cia­ry too has had to with­stand con­tin­u­ing on­slaught in­clud­ing the most re­cent at­tempt by one of our stake­hold­ers, to rekin­dle storms of con­tro­ver­sy against the ad­vice of its lawyers,” Archie said.

He said just as the court build­ing in Calder Hall with­stood Karen’s on­slaught, the ju­di­cia­ry has the “ re­silience …(and) abil­i­ty to tran­scend all that man and na­ture can un­leash to stymie our goals and achieve­ments.”

He said the ju­di­cia­ry will not be “dis­tract­ed by at­tempts, po­lit­i­cal or oth­er­wise, to smoth­er our progress.”

Archie said that while “lo­cal de­trac­tors” were mak­ing mis­chief, out­siders were tak­ing no­tice of the work done with him as “cap­tain.”

He said an ar­ti­cle in the 2007 edi­tion of the newslet­ter, News and Views on Civ­il Jus­tice Re­form, show­cased the ju­di­cia­ry’s strides in glob­al fam­i­ly law and in­no­va­tion.

He said it is time to re­vis­it the in­de­pen­dence of the ju­di­cia­ry as the To­ba­go Fam­i­ly court opened with a “skele­ton” staff de­spite long-stand­ing re­quests to have the mat­ter re­solved.

“We do un­der­stand that they have a lot of work, but the mat­ter has been there for quite some time, so we look for­ward to it be­ing ad­dressed with dis­patch,” the CJ said.

He said the de­lay “speaks to some lin­ger­ing struc­tur­al de­fi­cien­cies in the way the gov­ern­ment is or­ga­nized in this coun­try and the need for a re­newed con­ver­sa­tion about the sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers and ju­di­cial in­de­pen­dence.”

The Chief Jus­tice said the To­ba­go Fam­i­ly Court fit­ted in­to part of the ju­di­cia­ry’s over­all plan.

“The Chil­dren’s Court is not on­ly part of the ju­di­cia­ry’s plan to trans­form the de­liv­ery of its ser­vices to the na­tion, it is, but an­oth­er phase in the ex­pan­sion of ser­vices pro­vid­ed by the ju­di­cia­ry in an in­no­v­a­tive non-tra­di­tion­al way, mak­ing them more ac­ces­si­ble, cus­tomer -fo­cussed, ef­fi­cient and ef­fec­tive.

The ju­di­cia­ry plans to open two more fam­i­ly courts in San Fer­nan­do and Princes Town.

The court fo­cus­es on re­solv­ing fam­i­ly con­flicts by pro­vid­ing psy­choso­cial sup­port in fam­i­ly mat­ters in­clud­ing di­vorce, le­gal cus­tody, prop­er­ty is­sues and main­te­nance.