AG sees progress on judicial reform

Attorney General Dale Marshall says Barbados has made significant progress in its mission to reform its criminal justice system.

He made the comment while addressing the opening of the Second Attorneys General Roundtable at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre yesterday.

The forum is an aspect of the regional programme of the Partnership of the Caribbean and the European Union on Justice (PACE Justice).

Marshall said Barbados’ judiciary has made significant strides in its mandate, thanks to road maps formulated through the project in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the European Union (EU).

Lessons

The attorney general pointed out that many of Barbados’ challenges with criminal justice could also be found across the region, and there were lessons to be learnt from how other islands addressed these common issues.

“For too many years we’ve approached our challenges in an insular and siloed way, when, in truth, because of our heritage and commonality of our challenges, we really ought to be pooling our efforts – whether those efforts are in terms of intellect, processes, institutions – to find solutions. We don’t each need to reinvent the wheel.

“When we talked about gang legislation, we looked at the Jamaica model. In other areas, we’ve looked at the Trinidad model.

Way forward

“So, if for no other reason than the fact that we are able to draw from the precedent set from the other territories, it makes absolutely perfect sense for us to gather in these places in a roundtable setting so as to be able to chart our way forward,” he said.

The PACE Justice Regional Programme was launched on October 17, 2023, at Hilton Barbados Resort as a space for consultations, dialogue and information-sharing among the UNDP, the EU and a wide range of national and regional stakeholders responsible for the administration of justice.

The programme aims to reduce current and prevent future backlogs of criminal justice cases in the region with integrated software, hardware, training and other novel approaches towards addressing the long-standing issues.

“We’ve benefited greatly from the input and the output of gatherings such as this,” Marshall said.

“Last year, we talked about the [plea] bargain legislation. Barbados now has the . . . legislation.

“We also spoke about judge-alone trials. Barbados now has judge-alone trials legislation. We haven’t had that many judgealone trials, and our system is one where it is optional and the defendant can opt in, but we’ve actually had important cases being done in that way,” he added.

The two-day roundtable will focus on laws for witness protection and gang legislation, which Marshall said were “hot-button issues for Barbados”. ( JRN)

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