Editorial | Get impeachment and CCJ bills going

The phrase “in due course” offers no specific time when an event will happen. It will take place at a time that is appropriate, whenever that is. So it makes little sense attempting to infuse the issue with any more sense of urgency.

That, we hope, isn’t the idea Edmund Bartlett, the leader of government business in the House, intended to convey with his “in due course’’ remark regarding when impeachment of members bill, and other motions tabled by the Opposition, would reach the floor of Parliament for debate. Prime Minister Andrew Holness should ensure that proposed law, as well as others having to do with Jamaica’s constitutional arrangements, are given legislative priority. However, bundling the matters shouldn’t be a ruse to delay action or kill measures on which the administration may not be keen. In this regard, the process has to be transparent, with a clear legislative pecking order for the subjects. The constitutionally easier ones should be done first.

The question of whether MPs and senators should be subject to impeachment or recall has long been discussed in Jamaica without resolution. It, however, returned as a hot-button issue earlier this year in the wake of the George Wright affair. Mr Wright is the ostensibly independent member who entered Parliament last September on the ticket of the governing Jamaica Labour Party. When a viral video appeared in early April of a man severely battering a woman with fist and stool, there were immediate allegations of Mr Wright’s involvement and that the victim was his partner. Each separately filed complaints against the other for assault. Neither followed up the allegation or assisted the police with their investigations.

Notwithstanding the persistent claims against him, George Wright has said neither yea nor nay to the allegations, not even to his party when he was invited to discuss the matter. Instead, he accepted the JLP’s advice to seek a leave of absence from Parliament. He was purportedly removed from the party’s parliamentary caucus, and it was subsequently announced that he had resigned from the party, although retaining his support for the mission of the party and Government.

BROADER DEBATE

The controversy over Mr Wright’s suitability to remain as a member of parliament coincided with a broader debate of violence against women, triggered by a rash of killing and other forms of assaults, against women and girls. This was part of the frame in which Mark Golding, the opposition leader, reprised an old government bill, originally tabled more than a decade ago, during the premiership of his namesake and former JLP leader Bruce Golding but never debated.

Both versions of the bill – Bruce Golding’s original of 2010 and Mark Golding’s close facsimile – open the way for the impeachment of legislators who misappropriate public resources, neglect their duties or abuse their privileges in a manner that brought the office they hold into disrepute.

The difference in Mark Golding’s version, though, is that the introduction of language that would impeach legislators for “egregious conduct or other misbehaviour unbefitting of the holder of the office of senator or member of parliament, which is so serious in nature as to render the holder of the office unfit to hold that office; or bring the office held by the person into disrepute”. This wider construction, on the face of it, captures behaviour such as what Mr Wright is accused of, as well opening the way for MPs to be held accountable for their actions, including those outside of their legislative mandates.

For the proposals to be become law would require amendments to several sections of the Constitution to expand the ways by which members may exit the House and the Senate; to establish an impeachment tribunal to hear cases against legislators; to set out, and define, the impeachable offences; and to list the sanctions that the tribunal could recommend against members who are impeached. But since none of these clauses is entrenched, it would need neither special vote nor extension of parliamentary debate before passage.

SUBJECT TO REVIEW

Notwithstanding, our view is that the bill should be subject to a review by a joint select committee of both houses of Parliament, which invite public comment and hold hearings on it. The committee might consider whether the bill should include a recall mechanism similar to what obtains in the UK, where MPs who have been found guilty in court of certain crimes are sanctioned by Parliament for specific offences, are subject to a recall if 10 per cent of their constituents sign an obligatory petition. Such MPs can contest the recall election.

We feel, too, that the office of the political ombudsman should be reconfigured and called the Parliamentary Conduct Commissioner, whose job would now include filtering and investigating complaints against legislators before they reach the threshold for hearing by a tribunal.

In addition to the impeachment bill, the administration, given that this, too, would require no special process to its debate or passage, should also reprise the old Patterson administration bills to establish the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as Jamaica’s final court in civil and criminal matters to replace the UK-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Those bills, however, must be appropriately adjusted to constitutionally entrench the CCJ, which the Privy Council ruled is required for the CCJ to become a court of superior jurisdiction to the Court of Appeal.

Matters such as establishing Jamaica as a republic and removing the Queen as Jamaica’s head of State and fully repatriating the Constitution – for which the bills would have to lie in the House for three months before debate and a similar period afterwards, followed by referenda – will require additional legislative time. It is unlikely, therefore, that they can be in place, if the Government was keen for this to happen, in time for Jamaica’s observance of its 60th anniversary of independence in a year’s time – as many people had hoped. The process, however, should begin now.