20 - Foreign Judging and Securing Judicial Independence in the Anglo Caribbean

Summary

Foreign judging in the small jurisdictions in the Anglo Caribbean is ubiquitous and diverse. It is evident in extraterritorial and hybrid courts and a diverse group of foreign judicial officers. This chapter defines foreign judging to include intra- and extra-Caribbean personnel and institutions and complicates the image of the foreign judge as entirely an outsider. The chapter traces ways in which foreign judging has refined understandings of judicial independence in the Caribbean. It examines the dynamics of the two apex extraterritorial courts, one a surviving imperial court (the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council) and the other a more modern decolonisation-driven treaty-based court (the Caribbean Court of Justice). The chapter looks at how conceptions of judicial tenure until retirement are upended by mobile judges who serve consecutively or concurrently in more than one jurisdiction. It also explores how the stringent requirements for removal of a judge are recalibrated by the heightened scrutiny of judicial conduct in small jurisdictions.