What is now owed to the peo­ple of Cari­com, whose gov­ern­ments have placed them un­der the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ) in its orig­i­nal ju­ris­dic­tion, as well as the five coun­tries that have ful­ly em­braced the court's ap­pel­late ju­ris­dic­tion?

The sim­ple an­swer is clar­i­ty and truth. The con­tentions that have been re­port­ed, there­fore, must be ful­ly ex­plained and ex­am­ined. From there, the ob­jec­tive should be to iden­ti­fy and ad­dress any de­fi­cien­cies that may emerge in its man­age­ment.

The al­le­ga­tions, re­spons­es and counter-re­spons­es, in­clud­ing those from CCJ Pres­i­dent Jus­tice Win­ston An­der­son, have been ex­ten­sive­ly re­port­ed and de­bat­ed in the me­dia. One con­clu­sion al­ready drawn by this news­pa­per is that the me­dia has every right to re­port re­spon­si­bly on is­sues that have sur­faced with­in the court. To date, no one has chal­lenged the au­then­tic­i­ty of the doc­u­ments that have been cit­ed, on­ly that their leak was un­pro­fes­sion­al on the part of those who were re­spon­si­ble.

The pub­lic dis­clo­sure of these mat­ters has opened a pre­vi­ous­ly closed door, al­low­ing cit­i­zens to gain in­sight in­to what has tran­spired be­tween the pres­i­dent and oth­er judges of the court.

Those who be­lieve the me­dia should have re­frained from ex­pos­ing these de­vel­op­ments must nev­er­the­less ap­pre­ci­ate the pub­lic in­ter­est in un­der­stand­ing al­le­ga­tions of con­flict with­in the re­gion's high­est court.

The man­ner in which the CCJ op­er­ates, and whether changes or ad­just­ments are need­ed to strength­en its de­liv­ery of jus­tice, are mat­ters of vi­tal im­por­tance to the peo­ple of the Caribbean. As Lord Atkin of the Privy Coun­cil fa­mous­ly ob­served, "Jus­tice is not a clois­tered virtue."

There should, there­fore, be no fear about con­flicts among judges be­com­ing pub­lic knowl­edge. In­deed, dis­agree­ment is an in­her­ent fea­ture of ju­di­cial de­ci­sion-mak­ing. In courts where mul­ti­ple judges hear mat­ters, dif­fer­ing in­ter­pre­ta­tions of the law and ev­i­dence are both com­mon and ex­pect­ed.

Do all the judges of the Privy Coun­cil, which many re­gard as the gold stan­dard of ap­pel­late courts, al­ways agree on judg­ments? They do not. There­fore, if re­ports of se­ri­ous dis­agree­ments over the as­sign­ment of judges to cas­es, ex­pec­ta­tions re­gard­ing ju­di­cial con­duct, or even stan­dards of ju­di­cial at­tire are ac­cu­rate, such is­sues should not be con­cealed from pub­lic scruti­ny.

What is now re­quired is for Jus­tice An­der­son and judges of the CCJ to en­gage di­rect­ly with one an­oth­er and ad­dress the re­port­ed ar­eas of dis­agree­ment in an ef­fort to achieve res­o­lu­tion at the in­sti­tu­tion­al lev­el.

Be­yond the judges them­selves, these mat­ters should be re­ferred to the Re­gion­al Ju­di­cial and Le­gal Ser­vices Com­mis­sion (RJLSC) for a thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion and de­ter­mi­na­tion. How­ev­er, even this process may re­quire in­no­v­a­tive think­ing and care­ful man­age­ment, giv­en that the CCJ pres­i­dent al­so chairs the RJLSC.

The chal­lenge fac­ing the CCJ is clear, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the fact that there are sev­er­al Cari­com coun­tries which have still not yet sub­scribed to it as their fi­nal ap­pel­late court but may be con­sid­er­ing this op­tion. As such, the court, its judges and its ad­min­is­tra­tors must demon­strate to the peo­ple of the re­gion that they pos­sess the ca­pac­i­ty to man­age their af­fairs ef­fec­tive­ly and up­hold the high­est stan­dards of jus­tice. In the end, jus­tice must not on­ly be done but must be seen to be done.