Editorial | Constitutional discourse

The People’s National Party (PNP) is not the only one peeved at the Government’s lukewarm engagement of the public about the constitutional reform project.

So, too, like many other people, is Nadeen Spence, who chairs the public engagement subcommittee of the larger Constitutional Reform Committee (CRC).

“There have been minutes… (of meetings) where we discuss nothing else but the need for public education,” a frustrated Dr Spence recently told RJR. “But we can’t do the work … . All we can do is make our request clear. I know I’ve made more than one presentation on what our public engagement strategy ought to do, what our public communication should be, who we should be partnering with, what are some of the things that we need to do.”

The problem, Dr Spence explained, is that she has not been given the money to hire the people to do the work.

Donna Scott-Mottley, the shadow justice spokesperson, who is also a member of the CRC, has a similar complaint, as was reported on Monday by this newspaper. She does not know of any specific budget allocation for the committee to advance its work, including public education.

“I do not think that the consultations that we have had are satisfactory,” Ms Scott-Mottley said at a forum with reporters and editors of The Gleaner. “I think we are overlooking the need for public education, which is critical to being able to succeed in a referendum (on whether Jamaica should transform from a constitutional monarchy to a republic).”

PNP NOT WITHOUT OBLIGATION

As much as the burden for this rests primarily with the Government, Ms Scott-Mottley’s party, the PNP, is not without obligation. She cannot claim that it has acquitted itself particularly well.

For instance, while the PNP has rightly argued for Jamaica’s immediate disengagement from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) as its final court and accession to the civil and criminal jurisdictions of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), it has not systematically advanced the logic of this proposal, including the contradiction of exiting the monarchy and remaining in the JCPC.

This is not to say that the opposition party does not periodically touch on various elements of the argument, but there is an absence of intensity and cohesion and appropriate pitch.

Indeed, the Holness administration has made leaving the monarchy – a deeply entrenched clause in Jamaica’s Constitution that requires plebiscite to go forward – its priority, leaving the matter of the Privy Council for a later date.

“The Government has refused to indicate publicly whether this is because it intends or desires to remain with the Privy Council,” Ms Scott-Mottley said. “We want that discussion to be brought forward.”

The PNP, however, does not need the Government to widen the constitutional debate.

It can, without the usual tribalist overburden, engage Jamaicans on its own.

If the party is serious about the matter, constitutional reform should be seriously debated at its annual conference this weekend. Further, it should leave the conference with a mandate for the broader public discourse.

That should mean taking the issue across Jamaica, in non-partisan partnerships with various stakeholders, including community organisations.

A COMPELLING ARGUMENT

There is a compelling argument for leaving the Privy Council and embracing the CCJ, a court for which Jamaica not only already pays for but in which it participates as arbiter of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas that governs the Caribbean Community.

Firstly, joining the criminal and civil jurisdictions of the Port of Spain-based CCJ will widen access to ordinary Jamaicans to the top tier of justice. The Privy Council, on average, hears fewer than a dozen cases a year from Jamaica, mostly murder appeals that are generally handled pro bono by British lawyers, or matters filed by corporate entities or rich individuals.

Not only is it expensive to retain and/or send lawyers to appear before the Privy Council, many litigants would not qualify for visas to enter the United Kingdom. Moreover, the British judges who sit on the Privy Council have left little doubt that they would like the colonials, who take up too much of their time, to leave.

But the most profound contradiction is the proposed sequencing of the end to monarchy, while having the JCPC as the final dispenser of justice.

The Privy Council is an advisory body to the King of Jamaica, Charles III, who is also king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The JCPC, conceptually, is a subgroup of the Privy Council that deals with justice.

Cases to the JCPC, therefore, are prayers by the king’s subjects to the king for justice – a blatant anomaly for a country in a haste to be rid of the monarchy.

The Government has largely relied on social media dribblings for its public engagement on constitutional reform. It should urgently change that model. But others also have an obligation to pursue the matter.