Dare We Hope For Judicial Reform In Seychelles?

The Nation of 07^th March carried the article of Mr Barry Galvin, State Solicitor from the Republic of Ireland, having been appointed by the President to conduct a review of Seychelles’ criminal justice system.

Bravo!

A hum started deep down inside me and I was hard pressed to squash it before it burst into song!

Maybe this time round, Seychelles truly has a chance to move forward. Maybe this time, the new, democratically elected President of the country is seriously committed to break with the past culture of making empty placatory promises!

Law-breakers all over the world would reasonably always find cause to pick a bone with the courts, considering that none of them in prison is guilty of the crime for which they have been convicted. In our land, it would be no different.

But this is not why, for so long, we have regarded our Justice system with suspicion. This suspicion is over the whole Justice system, not only about the criminal justice system.

It is because those appointed to administer justice were, in our eyes, too often pliant to the undeclared wishes of those behind their appointments! To the point that for the average man on the street, in matters of respect of personal rights and freedoms, the courts and the judges were often seen as mere extentions of the ruling party.

And I am not even thinking about land acquisition in the public interest, nor of arrests and detention without due process so characteristic of the years 1977 to late 1980s. Those were years were the legislature gave Ministers legal instruments to do as they saw fit. Judges and courts were thus incapable to correct the perceived injustices.

I am thinking of those years since restoration of multi-party democracy from 1991. We were ostensibly a democracy with a new Constitution in which we had made it clear that the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary were independent of, and were to check and balance, each other.

Except that the Head of the Executive of the 3^rd Republic was a carry –over from the days of single party dictatorship who, while directing the affairs of state, far from addressing the festering cancer in our justice system, blithely contributed to worsening it.

Driving the credibility of government and the judicial system into the ground is probably never close to any political leader’s intent. It more likely arises as the ineluctable outcome of yielding unchallenged power and considering oneself unaccountable. It becomes then a simple step to gather the Legislature and the Judiciary into one’s fist and squeeze or cajole as necessary to maintain one’s hold over the nation

The Head of our Judiciary was, until his recent resignation, the very same who, in his own words uttered at a mid 1990s regional conference held at the Plantation Club on good governance, found no problem with administering the oath of Office of the Presidency during the Single Party Dictatorship period. (to which some delegates quietly snickered ‘ another monkey enjoying nuts thrown at him’. A local participant, now a prominent local politician of the ruling party, quietly laughed and passed on the remark to those who had not heard)

The very same who consistently ruled against petitions and grievances brought before the courts by the political opposition and went so far as to express doubts that the political opposition will ever form a ruling government.

The very same who headed courts which awarded damages to petitions from the ruling clique who found local newspaper articles that exposed their disregard for the law, abuse of authority and priviledge of office, corruption, cronyism, trampling on our constitutional rights and freedoms, etc, as ‘frivolous, offensive, libelous and defamatory’.

The very same who remained silent before the pervading intrusion of the ruling party in the administration of Justice, including perverting the Constitutional Appointments Authority, which until recently and possibly after repeated public denunciation by the political opposition, was chaired by a member of the ruling party’s central committee, also a lawyer who in that latter capacity, thus appeared before Judges he had recommended for appointment.

The very same who remained silent when the head Judge of the Appeals Court resigned in what was strongly suspected as resulting from his vocal stance against unacceptable incursion by the Executive in the Judiciary.

The Country has for a long time been perplexed over criminal activities that remained unchecked. Drug trafficking is a scourge, and drug abuse a plague, in our land. Yet local law enforcement merely succeeds in catching the odd low – level dealers and illicit drug user or occasionally destroying the odd cannabis plantation in some remote part of the island only to see another sprouting up somewhere else.

The barons, who surely must be behind the local drug scene, remain untouched, unknown, and one would dare suggest, not unprotected.

It has happened that law breakers, particularly those who are related to or have connections with the ruling clique, often have criminal cases against them thrown out of court because damning evidence against them disappeared while in police custody (Though it can be reasonably argued that these instances were more the result of the peculiar conditions of appointment of individual police or other officers of the local law enforcement system, and their personal disregard for the law and procedure codes in favour of some immediate and direct pecuniary benefits. That's corruption which pervades law enforcement systems all over the world).

In many ways therefore, and not all of them directly attributable to the person of the Chief Justice, our justice system was seen as flawed and our courts and judges did not always show that they were truly concerned with only providing justice fairly to all. In effect, justice, that inseparable arm of law enforcement, had been rendered, after long being perceived, as ineffective and inefficient.

The effectiveness of any judicial reform will however depend largely on the merit of the assessor. Who he is and how fairly he was chosen, may be indicators to how correctly the assessment will be carried out.

It will also depend on the depth and pragmatism of his findings and recommendations and the strength of the president’s commitment to deliver on his promise for reforms.

It is my hope that in three months’ time, rather than sigh at the Galvin Report, which will join the Rilley report, I can burst into song.