Latest update April 24th, 2024 12:59 AM
Aug 26, 2014 Letters
DEAR EDITOR,
By now, most of us are aware of the attempt of several Caribbean countries to demand reparations from several European countries for the “crime” of slavery. In this regard, CARICOM has hired the British legal firm Leigh Day to press its case in the courts should negotiations fail, which they will. This legal firm doesn’t come cheap!
Many legal experts have already concluded that the odds of CARICOM winning the case through the courts are virtually nil. I saw a New York Times report, quoting Roger O’Keefe, deputy director of the Lauterpacht Center for International Law at Cambridge University as saying that the planned attempt by CARICOM is “an international legal fantasy”. It is clear that CARICOM doesn’t have a legal case.
However, my big problem with this “legal fantasy’ is the financial commitments being made to this legal waste and the costs that CARICOM taxpayers could be asked to pay. One of the reasons why, it would seem, that Leigh Day was chosen by CARICOM is its reputation of winning cases that seemed impossible.
The firm managed to win a case, working with another legal firm that secured compensation for 23 mine workers in South Africa who contracted silicosis working in South Africa’s mines. The firm also won some fame after it won an apology and compensation for those Kenyans who were victims of Britain’s attempt to maintain its colonial rule.
When this firm won that famous pollution case that involved the people of the Ivory Coast against Trafigura four years ago, Trafigura was forced to pay thirty million pounds to the claimants. In addition, the firm demanded 105 million pounds (that’s over 17 billion Jamaican dollars) for its fee. The firm claims that that fee was justified on account of the amount of work it had to do in the case.
However, in all of these cases that Leigh Day has won, it secured legal victories and compensation for living victims, where the links between the alleged perpetrators and the victims were easy to identify. Doing so for reparations, in which the links, which many experts agree don’t exist, between the supposed victims and perpetrators then, and our predicament today, will be many times harder. In fact, even the firm’s senior legal partner, Martyn Day, confessed that this reparations case will be a very difficult one.
If easy cases like Trafigura cost over one hundred million pounds or 17 billion Jamaican dollars, imagine how much more difficult cases like reparations will cost?
Now, one thing that must be understood is that lawyers must be paid whether or not they are successful. With the odds stacked so high against CARICOM winning this legal case and the fact that this law firm doesn’t seem to come cheap, who is going to pay them?
Even if the firm doesn’t win, and I strongly believe they will not win, considering the huge amount of work that it will have to do, from digging through mountains of historical documents, trying to convince European politicians to “do the right thing”, spending many “billable” hours putting the case together among a host of other tasks, I think I can conservatively estimate that this legal bill will amount to millions of pounds, if not tens of millions of pounds. That’s hundreds of millions, if not billions, of Jamaican dollars!
On behalf of the struggling taxpayers of CARICOM who have had to be putting up with dilapidated roads, schools, hospitals, public facilities and frozen wages, high taxes, non-functioning fire trucks, under-equipped police forces, micro businesses being starved of funding and I could go on and on, many of which could be fixed several times over with that kind of money, I demand to know how the bill for this “legal fantasy” is going to be paid?
We need to know! We surely have productive ventures that we could spend that kind of money on!
Michael A. Dingwall
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