As citizens celebrate our half-century as an independent state, sadly, sinister moves are afoot by foreigners, local lawyers and rogue, backward foreign "courts" to destroy our standing as a sovereign nation. Moves are afoot to turn on its head the very legal and judicial system it has taken us many years to build and which has produced fine legal luminaries and judges respected by the highest courts of the world.
As such, I would like to alert our people, our country and our judiciary of attempts being made by foreign nationals (with the help of unscrupulous local attorneys who seek to purposely delay hearings and judgments at will in the local courts) to undermine our independence as a sovereign state with an independent judiciary and legal system. These foreign nationals believe that when they are not getting their way in the courts of Trinidad and Tobago, that they and their local lawyers can play games with our local legal system.
These foreigners-after surrendering to the jurisdiction of our local courts for substantial periods of time in order to adjudicate matters-who believe they are not getting their way locally, simply run back to their home country where they do some forum shopping, ie, find a kangaroo court to give them whatever they wish for, and get a judgment which they then expect our judiciary to blindly honour.
Our country, our people and our judiciary must categorically affirm our adherence to the rule of law, due process, fairness and the constitutional rights of our citizens to have matters heard in our jurisdiction, and for cases to be debated on their merits, not public relations campaigns based on groundless lies. Our judiciary must reject foreign judgments that place our citizens in harm's way and deny them their constitutional rights, especially when those foreign judgments are based on lies, deception, false and forged submissions.
Foreign nationals and their local and foreign lawyers must not get away with making a mockery of our laws and courts, putting them into disrepute. Local lawyers who are found to be part of such nefarious activity must be debarred from practicing law in our country and should also be incarcerated for such acts of treachery that are in violation of the attorney's ethical code of conduct.
Our judiciary must vehemently shun, scorn and reject forum shopping because it is inconsistent with the principle of discouraging parallel proceedings to avoid the risks of inconsistent outcomes and to judicial comity, and reduce unnecessary legal costs.
This perversion of sovereign legal systems called forum shopping and legal tourism should not be upheld by the T&T courts. If a foreign national has already received service of papers for a local action, the foreign courts should decline jurisdiction on the foreigner's suit or the local courts should decline to enforce the foreign judgment.
Our judiciary must put a stop to this travesty and perversion of justice and show that it will have zero tolerance for it because it is a recipe for chaos, anarchy and injustice, the very antithesis of any Judiciary. Our judges, who comprise the judiciary, must make bold decisions that are not purely and solely based on flawed legal precedent, but based on the public policy of our nation and all the facts surrounding a particular case. Our judges must act free from fear of the unfair pressure and unjust criticism being brought to bear on them, whether it be from foreign nationals and/or the countries behind them who set up systems to protect their nationals whether they are right or wrong.
A concerned citizen
(Name given)