Opposition urges Gov’t to prioritise impeachment bill debate

When the House of Representatives returns from its summer break later this month, the parliamentary Opposition says it will be pressing the Government to place on the agenda for debate a plethora of private members’ motions as well as a bill tabled by Opposition Leader Mark Golding to impeach wayward parliamentarians.

The bill for the impeachment of public officials who run afoul of the law has, in recent times, been the subject of intense debate following a decision by the committee considering the reform of the country’s Constitution to reject recommendations to place impeachment provisions in the new law.

Leader of Opposition business in the House of Representatives, Phillip Paulwell, told The Gleaner that the Government has shown little interest in organising debates on private members’ motions moved by the Opposition, as well as the bill of impeachment which was tabled by Mark Golding in 2021.

In tabling the impeachment bill, Mark Golding asked the House to refer it to a joint select committee of Parliament to allow for wide stakeholder engagement on the issue that had been first recommended in a 1992 report by the Stone Committee, chaired by the late respected sociologist Professor Carl Stone.

Paulwell told The Gleaner that the Opposition is adamant that the impeachment bill and private members’ motions must be dealt with before the annual constituency debates get under way.

“We are now struggling to see which of the private members’ motions would be dealt with before we get into constituency debate,” he emphasised.

The leader of Opposition business complained that despite raising these matters on a regular basis in Parliament, the parliamentary Opposition is yet to receive a positive response from the Government.

Minister of Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Marlene Malahoo Forte, said in her contribution to the Sectoral Debate earlier this year that after lengthy deliberations, the committee reviewing Jamaica’s Constitution proposed that there should be no inclusion of an impeachment process in the reformed Constitution.

Under the Bruce Golding administration of 2007, Justice Minister Delroy Chuck laid a bill in Parliament in 2011 for the impeachment of public officials who misuse their office. The proposed statute eventually fell off the table and was never reintroduced.

The former prime minister, at a recent forum at The University of the West Indies, expressed dismay at the decision by the members of the committee reviewing the Jamaican Constitution to reject the inclusion of impeachment in the supreme law of the land.

“If the JLP (Jamaica Labour Party) was committed to it and the PNP (People’s National Party) was committed to it, but in the committee where they both sat, they decided that it is not such a good idea, I am wondering whether it is the non-JLP and non-PNP members of the committee who persuaded them that this is not something that they ought to proceed with,” Golding questioned.

DISAGREES WITH ARGUMENT

At a ‘Reasoning with Bruce Golding’ in late July at the Faculty of Law, Bruce Golding argued that there was provision in the Constitution for the impeachment of judges of the Supreme Court and for the impeachment of the director of public prosecutions as well as the auditor general.

In looking carefully at the reasons for rejecting the inclusion of impeachment provisions in the Constitution, the former head of government said the committee states that it was dealing with something that was essentially a legal matter through a political process, as most impeachable offences were criminal in nature and properly triable in the courts.

Golding said he respectfully disagrees with this argument.

He said the proposals that were made in 1995 by a parliamentary committee were never conceived as a substitute for criminal prosecution.

“If a potential conflict exists between impeachment and criminal proceedings, let’s remove triable offences or the definition of impeachable causes rather than shredding the idea altogether,” Golding said.

edmond.campbell@gleanerjm.com