Warner ruling renews calls for justice reform

PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­[email protected]

The per­ma­nent stop to ex­tra­di­tion pro­ceed­ings against Jack Warn­er is be­ing seen as a hol­low vic­to­ry by com­men­ta­tors, but al­so as a sig­nal that struc­tur­al re­form is re­quired with­in the na­tion’s jus­tice sys­tem.

Po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath stressed that the rul­ing un­der­lined the need for State ac­count­abil­i­ty and hoped that this would be the main les­son emerg­ing af­ter sig­nif­i­cant fi­nan­cial and rep­u­ta­tion­al costs were in­curred as a re­sult of the 11-year le­gal bat­tle.

“The State must be care­ful in how they ap­proach mat­ters like these. And we’re not here talk­ing about the Jack Warn­er case alone, but any mat­ter, for in­stance. We bear in mind that this mat­ter went all the way up to the Privy Coun­cil and came back down. That costs mon­ey. That costs the State a lot of mon­ey,” said the po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tist in a Zoom in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day.

He con­tin­ued, “Now that the judg­ment has been giv­en that the State has al­so to com­pen­sate Jack Warn­er for his costs, that too again is go­ing to sug­gest even greater loss for the State. And that is some­thing that tells us now that we need to be mind­ful. And that those who con­trol the gov­er­nance of the State must be mind­ful of what it is cost­ing the coun­try and not do things out of po­lit­i­cal ex­pe­di­en­cy or make false al­le­ga­tions be­fore the courts.”

Ra­goonath made a call for the Gov­ern­ment to use its ma­jor­i­ty to in­tro­duce leg­is­la­tion that en­sures pub­lic of­fi­cials are held ac­count­able for their de­ci­sions.

At­tor­ney Fa­reed Ali felt that, de­spite the rul­ing, there were ul­ti­mate­ly no win­ners giv­en how the le­gal mat­ter se­vere­ly im­pact­ed Warn­er’s rep­u­ta­tion and es­sen­tial­ly damp­ened his po­lit­i­cal ca­reer. Ali added the rul­ing has sim­i­lar­ly dam­aged the rep­u­ta­tion of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s of­fice.

“There are no win­ners in a sit­u­a­tion like this. Of course, Jack Warn­er would be hap­py to walk away from the pub­lic view­ing of him in the con­text of fraud, cor­rup­tion and mon­ey laun­der­ing. But his rep­u­ta­tion­al dam­age is un­told. When we look at our po­lit­i­cal his­to­ry, he was asked to demit of­fice in terms of his po­lit­i­cal stay in the UNC or the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship in 2015 to now,” said Ali, who, how­ev­er, ques­tioned the de­ci­sions of for­mer at­tor­neys gen­er­al, Garvin Nicholas and Faris Al-Rawi re­gard­ing the mat­ter, find­ing fault in par­tic­u­lar with the lat­ter’s role in the pro­ceed­ings.

“Now, the au­thor­i­ty to pro­ceed is a very sig­nif­i­cant fea­ture in any ex­tra­di­tion pro­ce­dure. The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al is the re­flec­tion of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s of­fice in body and strength. It flies over the face of good rea­son why the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s of­fice, be­ing so heav­i­ly stacked with le­gal minds and so much so that the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al would have had the le­gal sup­port, if not the un­der­stand­ing that a spe­cial­ty clause ought to be ad­dressed when pro­ceed­ing on an ex­er­cise to, for all in­tents and pur­pos­es, ex­tra­dite Mr Warn­er,” said Ali. He said he felt Warn­er had every right to feel ag­griev­ed as he was a “vic­tim of the sys­tem” be­cause of what he called the State’s tech­ni­cal fail­ures.

Mean­while, for­mer Sec­ondary Schools Foot­ball League and Trinidad and To­ba­go Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent William Wal­lace said he was hap­py for Warn­er and hap­py the case was over.

Last year, cur­rent At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie launched a ma­jor in­ter­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the State’s han­dling of Warn­er’s ex­tra­di­tion mat­ter, say­ing a pur­port­ed 2015 “spe­cial arrange­ment” safe­guard­ing Warn­er’s rights in the US—which pre­vi­ous AG of­fices claimed ex­ist­ed and which the Privy Coun­cil re­lied on—could not be found or may nev­er have ac­tu­al­ly ex­ist­ed.