Sascha Wil­son

Se­nior Re­porter

sascha.wil­son@guardian.co.tt

The Privy Coun­cil is ex­pect­ed to ad­vise to­day on whether its rul­ing in the mat­ter of a law­suit brought by for­mer chief mag­is­trate Mar­cia Ay­ers-Cae­sar will be re­served.

Two weeks af­ter be­ing ap­point­ed a High Court judge in April 2017, Ay­ers-Cae­sar re­signed amid pub­lic crit­i­cism that she left al­most 50 cas­es in the mag­is­trates court un­fin­ished.

In her law­suit, she claimed that she re­signed un­der a threat that her ap­point­ment would be re­voked. How­ev­er, Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie and the JLSC de­nied any wrong­do­ing in the mat­ter. Archie claimed he sug­gest­ed she re­sign and re­turn as a mag­is­trate to com­plete the cas­es but main­tained that he did not pres­sure or threat­en her.

Ay­ers-Cae­sar’s law­suit was even­tu­al­ly dis­missed by High Court Judge David Har­ris.

The Chief Jus­tice and JLSC filed the ap­peal af­ter the lo­cal Court of Ap­peal up­held Ay­ers-Cae­sar’s law­suit in Oc­to­ber last year, in which she claimed she was pres­sured in­to re­sign­ing.

In re­vers­ing the tri­al judge’s rul­ing, the Court of Ap­peal crit­i­cised the JLSC, which is chaired by Archie, for im­prop­er­ly and il­le­gal­ly pres­sur­ing Ay­ers-Cae­sar to re­sign.

The Ap­pel­lant judges found that the is­sue of Ay­ers-Cae­sar’s case man­age­ment as a mag­is­trate was in­suf­fi­cient for her to be re­moved un­der Sec­tion 137 of the Con­sti­tu­tion.

Un­der the seg­ment of the Con­sti­tu­tion, judges can on­ly be re­moved for mis­be­hav­iour or their in­abil­i­ty to per­form the func­tions of the of­fice due to in­fir­mi­ty of the mind or body. A tri­bunal is ap­point­ed by the Pres­i­dent on the ad­vice of the Prime Min­is­ter in the case of the Chief Jus­tice and the JLSC for judges. The tri­bunal in­ves­ti­gates and then rec­om­mends whether the Privy Coun­cil should con­sid­er if the judge should be re­moved. 

Se­nior Coun­sel Ian Ben­jamin, rep­re­sent­ing the Ju­di­cial and Le­gal Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (JLSC) and Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie, com­plet­ed sub­mis­sions at the UK Supreme Court Build­ing yes­ter­day be­fore a five-mem­ber ap­peal pan­el chaired by UK Supreme Court Pres­i­dent Lord Robert.

Kings Coun­sel Pe­ter Knox start­ed sub­mis­sions on be­half of Ay­ers-Cae­sar and will con­tin­ue to­day at 10.30 am UK time. His sub­mis­sions are ex­pect­ed to last two hours, and Ben­jamin will have 30 min­utes to re­ply.

Ay­ers-Cae­sar and her hus­band Matthew Cae­sar were present yes­ter­day.