Snag Hits CBA Status Lawsuit

Micki Jafa Bodden	Wayne Panton

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

The Caymanian Bar Association’s (CBA) legal action to challenge the Cayman Islands Cabinet’s making of 2,850 grants of Caymanian Status last year has run into difficulties with its attorney of record coming off the case.

Sources indicate that attorney Micki Jafa Bodden will no longer represent the CBA in the suit filed in March seeking judicial review of the Cabinet’s Status grants. Mrs Jafa Bodden was in turn instructing London counsel Jonathan Auburn, and Lord Lester of Herne Hill, QC, in the matter.

CBA president Wayne Panton confirmed from overseas on Friday the development with Mrs Jaffa Bodden. “Circumstances have caused us to have to examine alternatives in seeking different counsel,” he said.

However, Mr Panton indicated there were no plans to drop the legal action. “We’ve made no decision with respect to changing our approach, other than seeking alternative counsel.”

Noted London barrister David Pannick, QC, issued an opinion earlier this year stating that there was a case to have the Cabinet’s Status grants reversed.

In April, the judge who considered and granted the CBA’s initial application for leave for such judicial review (believed to be the Chief Justice) agreed that there was 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 decision to proceed with the action created a rift within the CBA, with a number of its members resigning after the organisation voted to proceed with the lawsuit.

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