OECS Bar Association needs to show more teeth

9.FEB.07

Editor: How commendable the OECS Bar Association through its President Nicole Sylvester will not “allow in this day and age, the politicians to determine who should be the highest judicial officer in a manner that is unfair”? But what about ordinary citizens who have called on some of these same OECS lawyers to help expose the very thing about which they complain?

Those of us who have either watched or experienced the modus operandi of the OECS are heartened to acknowledge that the OECS Bar Association has finally decided to show the representative governments of the region that it has some ‘teeth.'{{more}} However, despite its task as a body to assist in dispensing, overseeing and upholding justice in the region and for all its people, the OECS Bar Association has been silent while severe injustices were handed out to ordinary citizens not only at the regional level but national level. Helpless citizens were left at the mercy of unscrupulous representative politicians of the OECS who deny their citizens their basic human right to “Freedom From Want” for no other reason than that of blatant politics. Many victims of this political manipulation of the system have called on various members of the OECS Bar Association to no avail. Instead, these lawyers have chosen to do very little and in some cases prefer to maintain their independence from governance, so they claim.

Nothing in my questioning of the current position of the OECS Bar Association takes away from my belief that what they are claiming is happening with the OECS government seeking a Chief Justice is accurate. In fact, it is all the more important for them to raise their voices over this matter as many Caribbean nationals have already expressed their fear of political interference in the regional judiciary system. Sadly, this is the nature of our political system and most of the politicians within it. Also, I hope that the OECS Bar Association, under the watch of Vincentian Nicole Sylvester, and the rest of the Caribbean society will now acknowledge that no individual or sector of our society is free from the actions of these too often unscrupulous politicians in the region.

Luzette King