A.G. says Bar was silent for too long
The Guatemalan claim to Belize is not the only hot button issue on Attorney General Wilfred Elrington’s table. The A.G. is in the process of seeking legal advice on a resolution he received from the Bar Association. The Bar is asking Elrington to force Supreme Court Justices who have outstanding reserved judgments to deliver them within a certain time frame or step down. As we reported earlier this week, the A.G. maintains that he is not sure whether he can intervene as asked and today told News Five that because the Judiciary is headed by the Chief Justice, he should really be the one to deal with the matter. Either way, Elrington says the problem is not a new one and has been building up over the last decade due to faulty judicial appointments and too much silence on the part of the Bar Association.
Wilfred Elrington, Attorney General
“So what you have now is that you have a very, very heavy workload and professionals who to my mind do not have the level of practice. You have to be practicing law for a long time and even when you are practicing for a long time unless you are particularly bright, you can’t really function well at the Supreme Court level; it’s very difficult and challenging job. And I don’t think the last administration over the last ten years has been careful in the appointment of judges. The ideal really is for us to have a bench of judges who are in a position to give judgments immediately after hearing arguments; that is not the case, but you can’t—I personally don’t hold the Bar Association blameless either because there have been appointments when I am told the Bar Association has made written submissions saying they don’t approve the appointment of this particular person. They have given written submissions to the Judicial and Legal Commission but the Judicial and Legal commission still went ahead and made the appointments. I think in those cases the Bar Association should have gone public and denounced it. But I think the Bar has for too long now remained silent. This is a situation that has been with us for many, many years now; it’s not anything new.”
Elrington says G.O.B. is looking to extend the terms of Justice Muria and Gonzalez to help ease case loads.
