At the end of June, we told you about the JURIST project which the Heads of Judiciaries all across the CARICOM Member States have been participating in. They are trying to draw on the collective wisdom of all officers of the court from these countries, to come up with a regional approach on what works, and what needs fixing.
They've been quietly working for during that time to address different areas, and today, they engaged in dialog about all that goes wrong when the court tries to administer justice when dealing with sex crimes. Today, the stakeholders sat down to figure out how to better address sexual offences, in a society where such crimes are on the rise. Here's what the Chief justice had to say:
Dr. Penny Reedie, Director. JURIST Project
"The Jurist Project is funded under a 19 million Canadian dollar arrangement with what we now call 'Global Affairs Canada' which was the former foreign affairs and international trade department. The project, as was said, is being executed by the Caribbean Court of Justice on behalf of the conference of head of judiciary of CARICOM. The jurist project has been working with judiciaries in the Caribbean to support their respective efforts to improve court administration and strengthen the ability of the courts and the judiciary to solve cases efficiently and fairly."
Hon. Kenneth Benjamin, Chief Justice of Belize
"Let's plot the course of a victim that as pertains now, the victim goes to the police station and makes a report, that victim was then subjected to a very demeaning medical examination and then has to write a statement recalling the entire incident and all the attendant trauma that goes with it. As if that wasn't enough, the witness then has to go to court and recount the incident all over again. Now particularly with children, this is very problematic and we are taking steps to have the law change so that the statement becomes the examination in chief so the witness will not have to go over the evidence again before the court."
"We're also embarking upon sentencing guidelines, because we all know that the legislator responds to issues where their searching crime with alteration of penalties. Penalties altered, heavy penalties do not solve the problem. We have to ensure that there is consistency in the sentencing that we're applying. I'm going to draw from two cases, two sexual offenses, one was attempted raped. The virtue complainant was 16 at the time of the offense in September 2016, that complainant was 22 years of age. In a case of attempted carnal knowledge, the virtue complainant was 12 at the time of the incident and in September 2016 was then 18 years old. So, I've just highlighted to you one of the problems that we are facing. Now how do we address these problems? First of all, setting guidelines is not going to cure the problem totally, there has to be an attitudinal change and hopefully the guidelines will set the stage for certain attitudinal change. There must be buttressed by other initiative and some of those initiatives are already in place and we're giving them time to take route. For instance, we promulgated the criminal procedure rules on January 11, 2016. Those rules must be adhered to because they set time lines for the first time we have time lines in relation to criminal cases."
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