.gif)
Fiji’s Chief Justice, Anthony Gates, says the task ahead for those judges who have returned to serve on the country’s reconstituted judiciary will not be easy.
In a three-page statement after being sworn in by President Ratu Josefa Iloilo yesterday, Justice Gates said “few if any judges throughout the world will ever have to face the dilemmas Fiji’s judges will face; to be intellectually honest and yet to be efficacious”.
Gates, fellow veteran judge Justice Devendra Pathik and Justice Daniel Gounder were sworn in by Iloilo yesterday, six weeks after all judicial appointments were revoked and Fiji’s Constitution abrogated on April 10.
Yesterday’s appointments follow the swearing-in of eight magistrates including a chief magistrate three weeks ago.
Justice Gates said there is no doubt in his mind that the judiciary must continue.
“Academic commentators may expatiate on the indelicacies of our situation, the constitutional dislocation itself, the present impossibility of constitutional compliance over appointments and many other niceties. What is of far greater significance is that the judges must act as judges. They need no other command. They must do the right thing,” he said.
The judge said the same commentators did not say how, if Fiji is to have no judges, “the people of Fiji will obtain justice whilst they await the agreement of the political parties now at loggerheads on how we are to return to the lawful rails”.
On the reappointment of magistrates and four judges under a new legal order by President Iloilo, “for the most part I wish to make no comment on the possible legal significance of these steps”, he said.
While he said how Fiji goes forward now is a political issue, Justice Gates said the courts should not be used as battering rams in order to score points in political disputes.
“Most countries have come to the realisation that longstanding problems can only be cured in-country by continuous dialogue,” he said.
“As has been seen in Fiji the courts cannot deliver effective remedies for such disputes. Of course, those who wish first to destroy, may still wish to use the courts for such an aim. But many will prefer to keep politics out of the courts.”
