Jurist in waiting

Mar 28, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

H@rd Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Judge not lest ye be judged. Being the incorrigible renegade that I am, here I am looking for trouble again. Where the gods dare not tread, just check and see who is seen, if not me.

GHK Lall

A good judge, we have some, but too few of them. We are in dire need of more of them. With just about all the other major national institutions either in thrall of, or cowering in fear before, or prostrated in subjugation to, the caprices of local leaders, the judiciary is theoretically the last standing presence guarding the bridge. Both the guardians and what is being guarded have manifested an increasing rickety side.

Decisions that make no sense by their illogic. Interpretations that are foreign (in word and practice) to wisdom. Verbiage that exhibits the garbage that judges come up with to rationalize their holdings. Without a reasoned and resolute judiciary, Guyana is deader than a doornail. With a ramshackle one, Guyanese are dead without them declared to be so, and them not even knowing it.

This is the backdrop against which the screening and selection process of new judges has been hailed and much watched. May it be more of a genuine process and not part of the widespread and domineering political pretense. For the love of God, may this society be gifted a huge handful of new judges that stand for constitution, country, and citizens. Whether company law or the law of comrades (godfathers), let judicial acumen and not judicial artifice prevail. Let judicial sagacity and not judicial servility take precedence. The last thing that this country needs, that this population, can absorb, is an extension into the storied realms of jurisprudence from the madcap, dunce cap culture that has invaded and controls Guyana’s National Assembly. Though difficult to believe, Guyana’s house of the people (parliament) has been reduced to a house of charlatans and a large warehouse of corrupt people. If anyone finds that I have breached the protocols of parliament by using certain censored elements of the English Language go ahead charge me, jail me, or shoot me. They do that here, don’t they?

The point is that Guyanese are in urgent need of a flock of new judges who would make them proud. Judging on the merits. Standing for the people. Being about what is judicially astute and not what is politically expedient. Or what reeks of substances that are personally enhancing. No position, no promotion, no judicial conclusion and production is worth the ambition. Can it. Kick it up the road, and down into the swamp of oblivion. This is what erects an unbreachable barrier between authentic princes of the judiciary and shambolic jokers not worth their law degree. This must be the caliber of the incoming batch of judges, they must stand in stark contrast to those who juice their way into favor. Guyana needs judges who are about national and natural justice, not those who allow themselves to become pawns of nincompoops, the puppets of those mocked in grand assemblies.

What I call for, push for, plead and press for, has its teething pains, for Guyana as a nation still struggling to recover from its birth pains. Almost three score years have passed, and the toddler stage is still clutched to, as if continued existence depended on it. If the once and still great United States of America with 200 years of experimentation and fermentation over Guyana is still working its way through less than stellar judges (Louisiana and Texas), then the prospects do not look too good here. When the still vaunted US Supreme Court found it necessary to apply the brakes on colleagues on lower benches, then there has been a glaring loss of judicial honesty. When a different kind of loyalty becomes the primary determining factor, then the check, the balance, the sobering-so much yearned for-dissipates in a haze of adjudications that make no sense. Regardless of the supporting phrases intended to deceive, and no more. It is what brings the judiciary into disrepute. If in America, where does that leave Guyana? Loyalty to the lure of lucre is injustice writ large. We have had that, and too much of it. Loyalty to lousy leaders, and there is a growing list that proves who stands for what, and where that condemns crucial issues of the times.

When the compelling matters of this State have had to be escalated to what is deliriously called the apex court, the CCJ, then this does not say much about domestic intellect or integrity. For when the CCJ is hailed and worshipped as the apex court, the final arbiter of matters Guyana, then I think that that consigns Guyana’s proceedings and rulings to a perpetual state of being less than the best. Of being second guessed locally and superseded regionally. It would be inspiring to learn of local decisions that instill confidence, which inspires hope, in turn. It is that this country can hold its own, that there is a judiciary that is its own searcher of truth, its own finder of fact. And nothing more, so help them God. I hope the latter still has some meaning and traction in this country.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

GHK Lall, godfathers, Guyana, Jurist, justice

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