Caribbean Justice, a group working for the abolition...

Caribbean Justice, a group working for the abolition of the death penalty, condemned plans by Barbados to amend its constitution in order to circumvent death penalty rulings by the British Privy Council, the highest court in the country.
In a statement, the group said such action would constitute a "breach of international law and set a dangerous precedent".
Caribbean Justice quoted a statement made by former Trinidad and Tobago Attorney-General Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, made in 1999 to the 12th Commonwealth Law Conference, stating that even if governments disagreed with the Privy Council's rulings regarding the death penalty, "they have an obligation whilst it remains the Final Court of Appeal from their countries to obey and carry out its orders".
"It would be a serious breach of the rule of law for any government to disobey the order of its Final Court of Appeal," Maharaj said then.
Caribbean Justice further stated that the rulings of the British Law Lords which the Barbados government plans to defy have not been perverse but in line with international law for the application of capital punishment.
It further questions, "in the wider context, if the government is prepared to respond to judgments it does not like by changing the law, what guarantees can the people of Barbados have that it will stop at the death penalty?
"Moreover, in moving to pre-empt any attempts to challenge the mandatory death sentence, the Barbados government will be out of step with regional trends and in breach of internal law," Caribbean Rights said, while noting that the mandatory death penalty has already been outlawed in the Eastern Caribbean.
The island's Attorney-General Mia Mottley recently tabled the amendments in parliament which are aimed at not only countering the mitigating effects of the 1993 Pratt and Morgan ruling by the judicial committee of Privy Council in London, which limits to five years the time that a prisoner should be kept on death row, but is designed to forestall the March 12, 2002 decision outlawing mandatory death sentences in seven Eastern Caribbean countries from being applied to Barbados.
This proposed legislation has taken on new urgency in the wake of the local Court of Appeal's grant of a stay of execution for four condemned murderers to whom death warrants were read on June 26 in preparation for a July 2 hanging at Glendairy, the main jail. Lawyers for the four have since filed an appeal with the Privy Council and are expecting a hearing when it reconvenes in October.