Correspondent's Notebook

Fiji’s new legal order

12 June 2009

As well as extending emergency law, Fiji recently put in a place a new set of terms and conditions for the country’s lawyers.

Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat presenter Geraldine Coutts reports on the new legal landscape in Fiji.

The scales of justice are a symbol used by many legal fraternities to measure the morale force in a judicial system.

More simply, the balance between support and opposition in cases before the courts, and a reflection of communal attitudes.

Since the sacking of the constitution and the judiciary on Good Friday, Fiji’s interim government is interpreting silence as happiness, and a lack of opposition, as support for a series of controversial presidential decrees.

Among them tight censorship of the press, and a new set of terms and conditions for the Legal profession.
After a quick read of the 50 odd pages of the Legal Practitioners presidential decree number 16, it’s not immediately problematic.

The decree which was released on 22nd May does things like setting out the process for legal practitioners to be registered. Also a Legal Services Commission to look at issues such as professional misconduct. Many of the rules and regulations in the decree are similar to some Law Commissions in Australia.

But on closer inspection something more insidious is revealed. How to give out practising certificates is being taken away from the Law Society, a critic of the regime in the past, and returned to the Court Registrar. From the 1st July the Court Registrar Major Anna Rokomokoti will have the final say on those entitled to practise.

Professor George Williams from the University of New South Wales says this is not a problem until a case comes before the courts presided over by a government appointee. One of the judges sacked and then reappointed by the regime. Professor Williams believes this could give rise to fear by legal practitioners appointed as opposing counsel in cases against the State.

Dangerous precedents are included with the introduction of hefty new penalties for law firms found guilty of professional misconduct or unprofessional conduct. Fines of up to $500,000.00 may be imposed in the event of a finding of misconduct. Other sections of the decree provide for imprisonment of up to a maximum of 5 years for breaches where no specific penalties have been established.

This may lead to lawyers declining to apply for new registration. Or those who do apply may be viewed as offering tacit approval of the interim government’s orders.

A former president of the Fiji Law Society Graham Leung says there is no doubt that the military junta’s changes to the country’s Legal Practitioner’s Act are clearly designed to control the legal profession and force a culture of deference to Fiji’s ruling regime.

Mr Leung believes “this will sound the death knell of the independence of the legal profession in Fiji”.
Proposed changes to the electoral system and electoral boundaries, changes set out in the People’s Charter for Change, the media and the law are being presented as evidence for what the interim government’s attorney-general Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum describes as a silent revolution.

The strict new measures have silenced the media, lawyers, political leaders and more recently church leaders with the ban on the Methodist church’s annual congress. It has also silenced a previously committed and politically aware community.

The pressure on Fiji’s Methodist church, lawyers, and political leaders to conform and not offer alternative opinions previously viewed by the government as criticism makes the prospect of a people’s vote when elections are held in 2014 as questionable.

The leaders of Fiji’s four coups in the past 20 years have each presented lofty ideals and the betterment of the country as the reason for overthrowing successive governments.