The CSME, CCJ and Private Sector

• Author: Hon. Mr. Justice Duke Pollard
• Pages: 91-114

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The CSME, CCJ and Private Sector

WHAT IS THE CSME?

The CARICOM Single Market and Economy CSME is an attempt at far-

reaching regional social and economic engineering among a group of political

entities which insist on retaining their autonomy of decision as independent

states. In effect, it is an attempt to superimpose a seamless economic space

on a collectivity of states which maintain discrete political frontiers acting

as barriers to the movement of goods, people, services and capital. The

conclusion of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas establishing the Caribbean

Community including the CARICOM Single Market and Economy is not a

terminal political event undertaken by CARICOM States. On the contrary, it

must be seen as the initiation of what is likely to be a protracted and intractable

process of economic and social transformation among an association of

sovereign states. As such, the CSME as a regional economic integration

process is not unlike the European Union whose beginnings go as far back as

1957 with the conclusion of the Treaty of Rome.

The Treaty of Rome (1957) which created the European Economic

Community (the EEC) was the culmination of a movement in Europe towards

international cooperation which was considerably accelerated by that

unprecedented devastation of human, private and social capital

euphemistically referred to as the second World War (1939-45). The

membership of the EEC which originally consisted of six States, Germany,

France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg, was enlarged in

1972 with the accession of Britain, Ireland and Denmark, in 1979 Greece, in

1986 Spain and Portugal and in 1995 Austria, Finland and Sweden. Today,

THE CSME, CCJ AND PRIVATE SECTOR

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9The Hon. Mr. Justice Duke E.E. Pollard

92 CSME: Genesis and Prognosis

following admission to membership of many former states of the Eastern

European Bloc, the membership of this experiment in economic integration

is twenty-seven states.

In 1986 the members of the EEC concluded the Single European Act

designed to facilitate the establishment of a single internal market among

their membership by removing barriers to the movement of goods, services,

persons and capital. By this measure, a massive harmonization of standards

in the EEC was undertaken by Directives issuing from the European

Commission. Directives were legal instruments having the force of law in

member states without the intervention of national assemblies but which

allowed the membership to which they were addressed the choice of means

employed to achieve stated objectives. This was followed in 1992 by the

Treaty of European Union (TEU) signed at Maastricht which extended the

scope of Community competence and strengthened its institutional machinery,

particularly the European Parliament. The TEU was designed to achieve

economic and monetary union in what was now to be called the European

Union and to introduce the status of European citizenship. Britain and Denmark

opted out of the economic and monetary union. Appropriately, the Treaty of

Amsterdam which was signed afterwards and entered into force in 1999

allowed for a Europe of concentric circles whereby, as in the Benelux countries,

two or more states of the full membership may opt to have closer economic,

social and political arrangements among themselves than with the rest of the

participating states. The Treaty of Nice introduced further institutional changes

in the European Union including augmentation of the jurisdiction of the

European Court of First Instance CFI by allowing it to hear and determine

some preliminary ruling issues.

Viewed against this background of regional economic integration in

Europe, it will be appreciated that the achievement of a single market and

economy among the CARICOM States appears to be a dim light on a distant

horizon. Unlike the European Union, the Caribbean Community as mentioned

above is an association of sovereign states with no central organs or institutions

enjoying supranational competence and in a position to devise and issue

instruments having immediate legal effect in the national jurisdictions of

member states without the intervention of their national assemblies whose

representatives are ever mindful of popular sentiment, which is not always

appropriately informed, and their tenure of political representation. In this

context it is important to bear in mind that the Caribbean Court of Justice,

which in the exercise of its original jurisdiction as an international tribunal

is considered in some quarters the institutional centre piece of the CSME.