JAMAICA | Tavares-Finson Calls CCJ ‘Reckless’ — The Record Says He Witnessed the Letters

Tom Tavares-Finson warns Jamaica against the Caribbean Court of Justice. The court record shows his signature on the instrument that helped keep us out of it.

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, Calvin G. Brown - August 12, 2026 - Senate President Tom Tavares-Finson has found his word. Confronted with leaked correspondence from the Caribbean Court of Justice, the King’s Counsel declared this week that it would be “extremely reckless” for Jamaica to commit to the CCJ as its final appellate court while the allegations swirling around the regional bench remain unresolved.

The People’s National Party has answered with a charge of its own. The remark, the Opposition says, reflects “the uncaring, disrespectful attitude” of a governing class for whom access to the highest court has always been a privilege of the wealthy — and it notes, pointedly, that these same leaders “have gone as far as breaching the Constitution of Jamaica with pre-signed letters of resignation in order to keep it that way.”

That second accusation is not rhetoric. It is a matter of court record. And the record carries Tom Tavares-Finson’s signature.

The Signature in the File

On 16 January 2012, the newly appointed Opposition senator Arthur Williams executed the undated letter of resignation that would later plunge the Upper House into constitutional crisis. The document was witnessed by one Tom Tavares-Finson, JP. Seven of the eight Opposition senators appointed at that time produced such letters.

Williams’ public account was that they came with cover letters authorising the then Opposition Leader, Andrew Holness, to date and deliver them to the Governor-General should any senator stray from the Jamaica Labour Party’s insistence that a referendum precede any accession to the CCJ.

In February 2015 the Constitutional Court declared that Holness had acted unconstitutionally, unlawfully and contrary to public policy in procuring and deploying those letters, and struck them down.

The Court of Appeal upheld the ruling. It declined to resolve whether the CCJ was the true motive behind the scheme, holding the factual dispute immaterial to the question before it. Jamaicans may draw their own inferences.

Nor was the Senate President a passive bystander. The judgment records that on the morning after the November 2013 JLP leadership contest, Tavares-Finson — “apparently acting as an emissary of the Leader of the Opposition” — informed Williams of his own intention to resign and asked him to convene a caucus of senators to see who else might follow.

A man who witnessed the muzzle should be careful about lecturing the country on prudence.

The Case He Actually Has

Fairness, in short supply throughout this argument, requires conceding that Tavares-Finson has not invented the CCJ’s difficulty. Trinidad’s Sunday Express published internal emails in which five of the court’s six sitting judges challenged the administration of its president, Justice Winston Anderson, with complaints ranging from a unilaterally imposed dress code to allegations of panel-fixing and attempts to influence outcomes.

One judge reportedly claimed he was removed from a panel hearing a matter of particular relevance to Jamaica. Tavares-Finson is right that this cannot be dispelled by press release, and his call for a public hearing is not unreasonable.

But the region has not met the moment with silence. The heads of the judiciary of Barbados, The Bahamas, Belize, Guyana, the Eastern Caribbean, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago issued a joint statement affirming confidence in the court.

Former CARICOM assistant secretary general Byron Blake urged urgency while reminding everyone that allegations are not proven facts. Veteran attorney Bert Samuels condemned the leak itself and doubled down on accession. Marlene Malahoo Forte, hardly a PNP partisan, called the leak a poor display of judgement.

An institution whose judges write to each other about the abuse of process is an institution in which judges still resist. That is a system with antibodies, not one without them.

What Sixty-Four Years Buys

What “reckless” conspicuously omits is any accounting of the status quo’s price. Samuels described it exactly: clients with arguable appeals who cannot afford England, or who cannot obtain a visa — sometimes counsel cannot obtain a visa — are simply kept out of justice. That is the settled Jamaican condition, and no leaked email caused it.

Guyana, Barbados, Belize, Dominica and Saint Lucia weighed the same risks and chose differently. Sixty-four years after Independence, Jamaica’s court of last resort still sits in London, staffed by judges no Jamaican appointed and reachable by a citizenry that overwhelmingly cannot afford the airfare.

Tavares-Finson is entitled to demand answers from the CCJ. He might begin by offering some of his own.

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