Earl Moxam, Senior Gleaner Writer

The Government is contemplating the option of shortening the time available to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for consideration of petitions from Jamaicans condemned to die.

This is not going down very well, however, with one prominent human rights advocate.

Word of the possible move came on Friday in the Senate from Attorney-General Dorothy Lightbourne. Senator Lightbourne, responding to questions posed by Senator A.J. Nicholson, the former Attorney-General, outlined a number of steps she said needed to be taken to ensure compliance with the five-year limit placed by the United Kingdom-based Privy Council (in the 1993 Pratt & Morgan case) on the time within which a condemned person must be executed.

One of these required steps, according to Senator Lightbourne, is ensuring that the Jamaican authorities respond to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights within a specified time.

Time restrictions

Furthermore, she said, "if necessary", the Government would pass legislation "to put a time limit on responses by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to petitions submitted to it".

The other steps outlined by the Attorney-General include ensuring that the transcripts of a trial are available within a specified time after conviction so that appeals can be heard by the Court of Appeal "within a reasonable time", and providing for the local Privy Council to consider the case of a condemned man "immediately after an appeal is dismissed by the Court of Appeal".

However, human rights campaigner Yvonne McCalla Sobers has expressed concern about the possibility of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights being restricted in the time allowed for consideration of petitions from Jamaica.

"I would certainly be somewhat alarmed if the appeals process is somewhat short-circuited," she said.

According to McCalla Sobers, head of Families Against State Terrorism, this "short-circuiting of the system" would be particularly bad in light of the existing deficiencies in the local justice system, which might have led to an innocent person ending up in a last-ditch appeal to the Inter-American body.

These deficiencies, she claims, include the police investigative process, where witness statements are often "manufactured"; where the police often rely on "flawed" identification parades; where poor defendants often do not have the benefit of the best legal representation; and, the inadequacies in the country's forensic system.