WHAT IS JUSTICE?

Sep 28, 2008 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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By Raphael Trotman,
AFC Leader

On Saturday last, I sat amongst a small gathering of family and friends as my father launched his book aptly entitled “Waiting For Justice”.

Apt, because at this time in Guyana, the Region, and wider world, justice is becoming a rare and precious commodity that is escaping the grasp of the poor in particular.

As I sat in the room listening to distinguished panelists extolling the virtues of rights and justice, I found myself asking the question “What is justice?”

I had not long ago had an interesting, and if I may add distressing, excursion into the Magistrates’ Courts of Guyana.

Having become engrossed in the politics of the day, I find myself less in court than I would want to be and perhaps it has helped me to be insulated from the travails of those who go to court seeking justice and are still waiting for it, but on the other hand has hidden from my eyes the many injustices that ordinary men and women endure daily.

I am bemused at what passes for justice on a daily basis. Persons who should never be charged are hauled before the courts and punished with severe bail amounts and remands and those who should be locked away whisper somewhere and are let go.

I am told of a case where a youth stole a bicycle and perhaps had a change of heart and returned it to its owner. Yet this youth was taken before the court and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

My father as a human rights activist has spent his life criss-crossing the globe helping ordinary people to find justice.

I, when I chose law as a career, imagined that with each passing year at the bar, I would see in my lifetime less people accessing the courts’ corridors because we would evolve into a more civilized and rights based society. This has not turned out to be what I expected.

Over the years, rights and freedoms are less respected than when I was first called to the bar. Most recently, I have seen legislation introduced that gives the Director of Public Prosecutions the right to appeal a jury’s acquittal of an accused person.

This I described in Parliament as the greatest abomination of my time both as a lawyer and as a parliamentarian because it undermines the very core of our justice system which presumes a person innocent and to be protected from the abuses of the state.

Nowhere else in the so-called free world could I find anything similar. What is frightening is that this power can be abused. Because we are not all saints, such power should never be placed in the hands of any one person.

This is why a jury of twelve peers should determine guilt or innocence and that determination should be final. It is always better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

As we make quantum leaps into the arms of globalization, democracy, and modernity, we would expect that more people would be better off today and their rights respected even without them having to go to court to seek protection.

In Guyana, we have a Constitution that enshrines individual rights and freedoms, but too many people, more than ever before in the history of Guyana, are approaching the High Court seeking relief and protection for some violation or the other.

As I see it, those who are not running to court for relief are being dragged there for every minor transgression imaginable. It is now money and power that buy justice in Guyana.

People can literally commit murder and walk away without being charged at all while the man with 3 grams of marijuana has to languish in prison for three years, leaving behind his wife and children to be preyed upon by sycophants.

Why should this man who is without might and strength be jailed and even possibly lose his life from disease or assault whilst the man with connections walks free to sin again?

Edwin Niles was such a person who was convicted of being in possession of marijuana. He was paying his debt to society, but never lived to walk through the prison gate as a free man.

Next year I plan to seek a review of the draconian law that severely punishes persons for having small amounts of marijuana in their possession. It is too draconian a law and is out of sync with society.

In fact, the law in itself is destroying more families, and ultimately our society, by sending fathers to jail when they could pay their debt in a less harsh way.

As I left the court last week I came across a group of women calling on the Almighty to intervene and “deliver” a certain Magistrate from insanity because the bail that had been granted to their sons was in an amount that no poor struggling family could ever afford.

For them this was as good as a sentence to prison. It is their lamentations that set me thinking about this protean concept we call “justice”.

I think of Leonard Arokium who continues to dwell in the dark as to what force of evil killed his son and workmen at Lindo Creek, and of the very Learned Magistrate whose hallowed Chambers were recently searched by police ranks and wonder what justice is there for them and many, many others like them who have no hope of justice.

Every society should have justice standing straight and tall as its beacon. The justice system, which includes, the police and prison services, should work in tandem to produce a safe and orderly society.

In Guyana today, the pre-occupation of the day is with guns and bullets and on little else. Without laws which are enforceable, and enforceable blindly and equally, there is no society.

This is why Guyana, despite all the decorations and adornments that are put up to make it appear pretty and palatable, will continue to be rated the second most corrupt state in the hemisphere.

Money, power and political influence have now contaminated and corrupted almost every facet of our society; if not all.

We pretend to have justice here but too many, and invariably, only the poor are shut out completely. My comments are not meant to chastise those who administer justice in Guyana but to speak on a matter that is on everyone’s lips.

As Lord Atkin stated in Ambard –vs- the Attorney General of Trinidad & Tobago “Justice is not a cloistered virtue, she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, even though outspoken, comments of ordinary men.”

If people lose a sense that there is no justice for them or that there is one system for some and another for them, they will resort to other means to gain attention and to settle their disputes.

This is what we see every time a person arms himself with an AK-47 and what we are beginning to hear in the lyrics of the resistance music that is now standard.

Unfortunately, these realities are unknown or forgotten by the present administration and it is becoming near impossible to convince them otherwise.

The job of the next government has to be to restore order and the rule of law in Guyana as priority number one.

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