Court To Review Status

Hon McKeeva Bush

Thursday, April 15, 2004

The Caymanian Bar Association (CBA) has been granted leave by the Cayman Islands Grand Court to pursue its application for judicial review of the lawfulness of the wholesale grants of Caymanian Status by the Cabinet in 2003.

This means that the judge considering the CBA’s application for leave for such review (believed to be the Chief Justice) has agreed that there is at the very least an arguable case to put forward at a substantive hearing of the action.

The thrust of the CBA’s case is that the Cabinet may have acted unlawfully last year in granting Caymanian Status to so many people at one time in purported exercise of its “special” power to make such grants.

The CBA has asserted that the relevant section of the Immigration Law is intended to be an exceptional power and that the Cabinet could not, therefore, properly have found there to be "special reason" for the grant of Status to the 2,850 people listed in Gazette No. 33/2003.

In particular, if 1,400 grants of Status were made at one Cabinet meeting, the Cabinet could not possibly have assessed whether there were "special reasons" in each and every case.

The Leader of Government Business, the Hon McKeeva Bush, has defended the legitimacy of the Cabinet’s actions by stating that the Attorney General was present at every relevant meeting. He further referred to the CBA as “stupid”, an epithet that would now seem to have been refuted by the Chief Justice.

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