Jamaica parliament paves way for salary hikes for senior judges

Jamaica's Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Audley Shaw

KINGSTON, Jamaica, July 3, 2009 – Jamaica’s parliament has approved a resolution cutting the link between salaries paid to high court judges and those for legal officers in the public service. The move frees government's hand to award increases to the higher judiciary, without the constraint of having to extend similar benefits to its legal officers.

It was one of several recommendations made by a three-member commission which reviewed the salaries of the judges, and reported last year that they were "woefully inadequate and embarrassing".

Minister of Finance and the Public Service, Audley Shaw, piloted the Civil Service Establishment (general) (amendment) (No. 2) Order 2009, in the House of Representatives. He explained that in 1993 the previous administration adopted a wage policy in which increases in the salary scale for legal officers in the public service were linked to the scale of increases granted to High Court and Court of Appeal judges.

Shaw said that the commission felt that, given the need to protect the constitutional independence of the higher judiciary as well as their special circumstances, they ought to be paid salaries on the basis that the higher judiciary is not part of the civil service, or any other executive arm of government, and reflecting the role they play in the proper functioning of the country's constitutional machinery.