Busi­ness­man and so­cial ac­tivist In­shan Ish­mael has failed in his bid to stop four-time Ca­lyp­so Monarch We­st­on Rawl­ins, known as Cro Cro, from ap­peal­ing his (Ish­mael) land­mark defama­tion case. 

De­liv­er­ing a de­ci­sion, late last month, Ap­pel­late Judge James Aboud dis­missed an ap­pli­ca­tion from Ishamel to strike out Rawl­ins’ ap­peal over a de­lay in seek­ing a court tran­script. 

In Jan­u­ary, High Court Judge Frank Seep­er­sad ruled that Rawl­ins de­famed Ish­mael in his 2023 song An­oth­er Sat is Out­side Again and or­dered $250,000 in com­pen­sa­tion. 

Af­ter Rawl­ins lodged an ap­peal, Ishamael’s lawyer Richard Jag­gasar filed an ap­pli­ca­tion to have it dis­missed with­out a hear­ing based on the fail­ure of Rawl­ins’ le­gal team to seek di­rec­tions from the Court of Ap­peal as re­quired un­der the Civ­il Pro­ceed­ings Rules. 

The ap­pli­ca­tion was not im­me­di­ate­ly served on Rawl­ins’ le­gal team, which ap­plied for an ex­ten­sion. 

In re­solv­ing the dis­pute, Jus­tice Aboud not­ed that while Rawl­ins’ lawyers at­tached a copy of Jus­tice Seep­er­sad’s rul­ing to the ap­peal, they failed to ap­ply for a tran­script of the pro­ceed­ings, which is need­ed for the ap­peal, in a time­ly man­ner. 

De­spite his find­ing, Jus­tice Aboud ex­er­cised his dis­cre­tion to al­low the ap­peal to pro­ceed based on his view that the coun­try’s ap­pel­late courts need­ed to weigh in on the im­por­tant le­gal prece­dent set in the case. 

“The de­mar­ca­tions be­tween our ca­lyp­so’s his­toric, satir­ic, and comedic com­men­tary and the rules of strict jour­nal­ism need to be de­lin­eat­ed by our high courts,” he said. 

Stat­ing that he was not en­tire­ly con­vinced by the rul­ing, Jus­tice Aboud said: “The tri­al judge al­so made many ex­tra­ne­ous and far-reach­ing com­ments on this cul­tur­al tra­di­tion, the va­lid­i­ty of which I am not now sure.” 

“If this el­e­va­tion of a slan­der to a li­bel re­mained in our law books then our ca­lyp­so­ni­ans would be re­strict­ed by this judg­ment in any live per­for­mance, whether at a pri­vate par­ty among friends or at a pub­lic per­for­mance,” he said. 

Rawl­ins penned the song last year fol­low­ing so­cial me­dia furore to­wards Ish­mael based on his com­ments on the cel­e­bra­tions host­ed by res­i­dents of Beetham Gar­dens af­ter fel­low res­i­dent Ka­reem Mar­celle was called to the bar in No­vem­ber 2022.

In de­ter­min­ing the case, Jus­tice Seep­er­sad had to con­sid­er whether ca­lyp­so­ni­ans are pro­tect­ed by the defama­tion de­fence of qual­i­fied priv­i­lege. 

“As a con­se­quence, the role and rel­e­vance of ca­lyp­so gen­er­al­ly and the genre of po­lit­i­cal and so­cial com­men­tary in par­tic­u­lar, has to be re­viewed, re­vis­it­ed and re­for­mu­lat­ed,” he added.