High Court judge Car­ol Gob­in has tak­en Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie to task for what she called a drop in the per­for­mance of the mag­is­trates court and a lack of ac­count­ing for the de­cline.

Gob­in de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at the An­nu­al Gen­er­al Meet­ing of the Coali­tion Against Do­mes­tic Vi­o­lence yes­ter­day at Robin­son Ville, Bel­mont.

In her re­marks she fo­cused on the what is tak­ing place at the mag­is­trates courts over the past few years.

She point­ed to as­pects of the speech de­liv­ered by CJ Archie at the open­ing of the 2019/2020 Law Term two weeks ago, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it re­lat­ed to sta­tis­tics on all the courts un­der his purview.

“What is telling and glar­ing­ly so is that sev­er­al sub­heads that fol­lowed, and these were sub­heads for the Court of Ap­peal, the High Court Civ­il, the High Court Crim­i­nal, the Fam­i­ly Court, the Chil­dren Court and the Pro­bate Court, there is no ref­er­ence to the mag­is­trates court. This is where 95 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion is go­ing,” she said.

She added that all the courts iden­ti­fied in­for­ma­tion on the num­ber of mat­ters filed, dis­posed of and a clear­ance ra­tio.

Jus­tice Gob­in said she re­searched on­line and found that for the 2017/2018 Law Term there were 140, 994 new mat­ters filed, among those were 7,516 do­mes­tic mat­ters.

She said: “7,516 is more than of course fig­ures in the Fam­i­ly Court, more than the fig­ures in the Civ­il High Court.”

She added that the last sta­tis­tics put on­line for 2017/2018 in­di­cat­ed an over­all there drop in the clear­ance rate at every lev­el in the mag­is­trates court.

She used do­mes­tic vi­o­lence fil­ing as an ex­am­ple.

She said in 2013/2014 there was a clear­ance rate of 90.2 per cent, in 2014/2015 it was 92.5 per cent, in 2015/2016 it was 93 per cent and in 2017/2018, 67.8 per cent.

“There is no ac­count­ing for this drop in the clear­ance ra­tio.”

Jus­tice Gob­in then ex­pressed con­cern over this fact.

“This is such a dis­turb­ing ta­ble and the in­for­ma­tion con­tained in it and sure­ly this is some­thing if we are con­cerned about equal­i­ty and ac­cess to jus­tice for the dis­en­fran­chised and mar­gin­alised, this is some­thing we need and ex­pla­na­tion on. It is not good enough to sim­ply just ig­nore the sta­tis­tics, ig­nore the du­ty to ac­count by way of pro­vid­ing the sta­tis­tics, sim­ply to ig­nore it, not even to in­clude the mag­is­tra­cy on the list that you’ve pre­pared.”

She said while there are rea­sons for the Ju­di­cia­ry to con­grat­u­late it­self, for some of the re­forms and im­prove­ment, there are still unan­swered ques­tions.

She ad­mit­ted that some of the prob­lems fac­ing the courts are big­ger than all the stake­hold­er in­sti­tu­tions and there are long term so­lu­tions avail­able but, “in the short term all I would re­spect­ful­ly like to sug­gest is that at least we de­mand some ex­pla­na­tion for these sta­tis­tics. What has ac­count­ed for the se­ri­ous drop in the de­liv­ery of jus­tice at the mag­is­trates court. Why is it there are no fig­ures avail­able for the last 2018/2019 year? Why is it that any­body thinks it is ac­cept­able to sim­ply not even ex­plain the ab­sence of the fig­ures? This is what has been done by Chief Jus­tices through­out this is his­tor­i­cal­ly how you ac­count for the per­for­mance of the courts.

She added: “I’m com­ing around to the view that mag­is­tra­cy is sim­ply the aban­doned child of the ju­di­cia­ry be­cause at least bas­tard chil­dren at least have rights and peo­ple can of­ten recog­nise bas­tard chil­dren and you can have a re­la­tion­ship but from these sta­tis­tics and the ne­glect…let’s try and bring this aban­doned child back in­to the home.”

Jus­tice Gob­in said it seems that none of the re­forms aimed at bring­ing re­lief are aimed where it seems crit­i­cal if we are to sur­vive.