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Contact:
John Emmanuel
Tuesday, April 29, 2003 - Staff of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court
together with their counterparts from the Bahamas, Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad
and Tobago, move into the final day of a two-day regional workshop on Judicial
Statistics, on Tuesday at the Cara Suites Hotel.
Organized by the Judicial Education Institute and the Judicial Studies Centre of
the Americas, the exercise is geared at creating a more equitable and efficient
justice system. Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court Administrator, Gregory Girard
says the judiciary and the general pubic stand to benefit tremendously from the
initiative in the wake of the enactment of new rules of the Supreme Court and a
major computerization process.
According to Girard “With computerization you have the increase ability to
generate information,” said Girard. He pointed out further, “information that
will show you how the Court is performing, information to help you manage the
resources of the Court in terms of deployment of judges, how judicial time is
spent, ensuring that cases don’t slip through the cracks and present a problem
later on. What the conference is geared at is having gone through reforms in
terms of introduction of new rules and computerisation we are trying to get a
consensus among colleagues in the region.”
Girard says although a definitive time frame could not be pin-pointed, the
average person was already reaping benefits from improvements in the
administering of justice in the region, all brought about through the analysis
of existing data and attempts at greater data collection.
He exclaimed, “There should already be signs of improvement given the new rules,
but I think one will observe that there may be greater improvements in the next
few months to come. Of course there are different aspects of statistics, there
are those you can get which shows how things can change over time and there are
statistics for a particular point in time that will indicate the number of
things that you are doing. The overall idea is that as one observes how things
are moving over time one can get a feel for what improvements are taking place
and what improvements are not taking place.”
Facilitators for the workshop include Ms.Luciana Sanchez of the Justice Studies
Centre of the Americas and esteemed Caribbean jurist, Karl Hudson-Phillips Q.C.
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