The courts are not the corner shops

Aug 18, 2019 Editorial

The local courts used to be a place held on a pedestal: there but not really there; a realm shrouded in grandness and held in reserve for when things go wrong, and there is nowhere else to go to for, sometimes, desperate relief, for truth and justice, for the majesty of the law in its sparkling radiance and breathtaking sweep.
The court reigns as the supreme arbiter in the land embody and project all that is profound, and that which is final.
The courts were approached with some uncertainty, not-a-little trepidation, varying degrees of awe for the airing of grievances in the hope of favourable resolution.
In this arena of jurisprudence, men and women–practitioner and petitioner, friend and foe, yeoman and peasant– came to seek remedies for incurable ills; remedies that eluded; and for solutions in which a great degree of faith and trust and confidence was vested.
The court has spoken. That was yesterday. Seems ancient, if not quaint and increasingly irrelevant nowadays, given what prevails.
For the courts of today, indeed, is of the customary adversarial. Yet it is of more than citizens and corporations and criminals locked in the unending conflicts that savage the breasts and motivations of man, and many times make them into beasts.
Today, the world of the courts of Guyana is shriveled and shredded, almost daily it seems, with one contention after another relative to the socially inflammatory, the politically scorching, the racially piercing.
This has become so ordinary and every day that the luster of the halls of justice has suffered. Those halls and interpreters of legal mysteries (and sorceries) bend under the incalculable weight of interpretations that nobody wants to make. The edifice shakes.
It shudders from the rush of so many hustling feet and the roar of so many quarreling voices raised in the national contentions and discordances that sour and acidize, that leave panting for breath and lacking in spirit.
As men and groups engage in the spectacles of their believed noble and democratic pastimes, the third arm of government is rendered infinitely lesser. It has become as normal as the sprawl of the market square; as hastened to and patronized as the old, familiar, corner shop: convenient, stacked and packed, and as jostling and bustling and all so commonplace.
It is not reaching too far, or too inaccurately, to suggest that the courts of Guyana have become as common as the cacophony of the rum shops; and with all the agitated spirits that seek succor amidst the elbowing for attention, the imbibing to distraction, and the regular brawling for some fleeting, meaningless satisfaction.
It may be postured that it is a different time with different values, metrics, and objectives; that there is cleverness in seeking the mantle of the constitution, law, and the adjudication of the courts; and that, in the clash of incoherent circumstances, the courts have fallen from its once pristine pinnacle, as it is hauled into the gutter of the cheap and the dirty.
When governance and politics combine to monopolize the attention of the jurists, rivet a nation, and diminish the ideals of a land struggling to discover itself, then the courts, too, are diminished inevitably; perhaps irreparably.
For the local courts, from its highest levels, to its forced ordinariness, has been reduced to the roll of the dice in the gaming of a nation’s destiny. Thus, the final frontier, the one unyielding barrier, trembles and totters under the demands placed upon it, the expectations invested in it. Unreal. Improper. Reckless and coarse.
To say that Guyana is now a thoroughly litigious society is an understatement. And that crass political agendas dominate is not exaggeration. When examined carefully, the local courts have been as misused as men using lampposts to relieve themselves in public; and like the many road users determined to make everyone else surrender to their will and ways.