He said that the Christie administration is “no different” than the Ingraham administration in having not granted the courts that autonomy.
Mr. Gomez also called it “ludicrous and mind-boggling” that judges elsewhere in the region are paid almost double the salary of a judge in the Bahamas, and called on the government to “seriously fund” the judiciary.
On both the issue of judicial salaries and judicial autonomy in the Bahamas, Mr. Gomez found an ally in Opposition Senator Carl Bethel, who called the wages paid to Bahamian judges “an active disincentive” to “people of judicial caliber.”
“I will continue to reiterate that the time has come for the government to seriously fund the judicial arm of the government and if the security of that funding is to be questioned, it would be better for us to have consensus on giving the court complete and total autonomy,” Mr. Gomez said.
Mr. Bethel said “it is necessary at this stage in our development for this country to seriously take the whole question of the judiciary out of the hands of the legislature and the executive, and to free the judiciary to administer their own affairs and to set their own budgets after appropriate consultations.”
“It is ludicrous and mind-boggling that countries such as Barbados can pay their judges almost double what we are paying ours (in the Bahamas),” Mr. Gomez said.
He called it “mind-boggling” that judges in the Cayman Islands make £130,000, in Bermuda, close to £150,000, and in Malta, approaching £225,000.
“These are our competitors,” he said. “When we seek to get judges, they measure particularly when they are from abroad, the amount of money they are going to get for their services.”
Mr. Gomez also chastised “an independent Member of Parliament” for “savaging” the reputation of every member of the judiciary with remarks made last week.
“An independent Member of Parliament savaged the reputation of each and every sitting member of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal. Notwithstanding that he prefaced his remarks by saying that ‘some of them, and they know who they are’ the fact of the matter remains that the rest of us don’t (know who he is referring to),” Mr. Gomez said.
Independent Member of Parliament for Bamboo Town Tennyson Wells, who served as attorney general in the Ingraham Administration, last week charged that some judges are making decisions not based on the evidence of cases, but based on who the lawyers are before them or what law firms they are from.
He did not name any judges.
“The judges know when they are doing wrong; the defendant knows when his rights are being abused and the claimant knows when his rights are being abused,” Mr. Wells said. “The lawyer, the client and witnesses, whoever they are, should not be a factor anymore. It is the evidence. He should decide on the evidence and the law alone.”
Mr. Gomez said that these remarks raised serious questions about how Bahamians perceive and treat the judiciary, and called on the government to grant the judiciary complete autonomy.
He expressed surprise that “the member” had not been invited to set his complaint in writing to “the appropriate constitutional officers,” which would have given rise to the impeachment process, as set out in the constitutional method of bringing complaints against judges.
Mr. Gomez found an ally on this point as well in Mr. Bethel, who also expressed “dismay” over the remarks, which he termed “a blistering and full-scale attack.”
“He knew who he was speaking about, and possibly the persons being spoken about knew (he was speaking about them), but nobody else knew who was being spoken about, and it was a personal and direct attack that was in effect interpreted by many people as being an attack on the entire judiciary,” Mr. Bethel said.
He said this was “unfortunate” because the only guarantee that Bahamians have of the rights and freedoms promised in the Bahamas Constitution is that those rights and freedoms will be enforced by the judiciary.
The Senate was debating amendments to the Supreme Court Act, amendments that Mr. Bethel called “cosmetic legislation,” and which Mr. Gomez conceded could be “more substantive.”
“(My remarks on the judiciary) may well be more substantive (than the amendment to the Supreme Court Act) but this (amendment) is a start,” Mr. Gomez said.
The amendment to the Supreme Court Act removes the legal requirement that where the title of Senior Justice is conferred upon two justices, one of the Senior Justices must live in Freeport and the other in Nassau.
The amendment also replaces the British crown on the seal of the Bahamas Supreme Court with the Bahamian Coat of Arms.
“This bill is cosmetic. Nothing more,” Mr. Bethel said of the amendment. “(Those things) are not the real issue.”
In Mr. Bethel’s view, the real issue is what he termed the exponential increase in crime rates in the Bahamas. He said the amendment to the Supreme Court Act would have no real effect on the efficiency of the court.
By: Quincy Parker, The Bahama Journal
