(CMR) The Office of the Ombudsman (OMB) found that maladministration had occurred in the Cayman Islands Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC) due to its failure to update its complaints policy for judges to bring it in line with the CI Constitution.
The Ombudsman carried out investigations after a complaint was lodged alleging that the existing complaints policy maintained by the Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC) did not comply with section 106(10) of the Cayman Islands Constitution Order (CI Constitution) after amendments were made in 2016.
There was a policy in place for making complaints against judges; however, the complainant pointed out that it was not updated or compatible with the 2016 amendment to the constitution.
The OMB looked into the issues of a lack of applicable complaints policy/procedure and unreasonable delay in addressing complaints.
“Given that the JLSC appears, at the very least, not to have acted with any urgency in complying with its constitutional responsibility to draft a complaints policy, I found that this extraordinary delay of some seven years amounts to maladministration,” the OMB said in a letter to the complainant, where the findings were explained.
The OMB, however, said it had no jurisdiction to investigate the decisions made by the judge or the JLSC that the complainant said were “null & void” for want of a lawful complaints policy.
According to the letter, “the JLSC acknowledged its complaints policy for judges was deficient and required amendment to bring it in line with the CI Constitution. The JLSC’s complaints policy for judges, by its own admission, needed at least some amendment to meet the current legislative requirements. The policy had still
not been fully amended at the time of this investigation, some seven years after the CI Constitution.”
The JLSC has since issued a new draft policy for complaints against judges, which was made available for public review on the JLSC’s website as of 31 October 2023.
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