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Caribbean Court Gives Chickens Time of Day

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Times Staff Writer

In the sweaty abandon of a summer festival, did calypso singers libel chickens?

That question, with all of its free speech ramifications, is the unlikely first issue taken up by the Caribbean Court of Justice, the new regional high court that is replacing the London Privy Council and completing a four-decade journey to independence for former British colonies in the Caribbean.

Although the court, formed in April, is intended to sort through the legal complexities of an emerging single market and to interpret human rights according to Caribbean mores, those lofty issues have been preempted by a 16-year-old case in which a defunct chicken farm in Barbados is seeking $1.4 million in damages for the alleged defamation of its poultry.

The case of the maligned chickens began in 1989, when the island’s Daily Nation reported that employees of the McDonald Chicken Farm had told the paper that birds that died of disease were plucked and sold anyway to local restaurants.

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Throughout the Caribbean, calypso singers take their role as satirists seriously. At Barbados’ Crop Over Festival that year, they embraced the barnyard scandal with songs like “Pluck It” and “Madd Chicken Song.”

During Barbados Rediffusion’s live radio broadcast of the festival-culminating Pic-o-de-Crop calypso contest, emcees further ruffled feathers with jokes and descriptions of revelers decked out as sick chickens.

In 1990, farm owners Ram and Asha Mirchandani shuttered their business, saying it became bankrupt as a result of the songs, and filed suit against the radio station, the newspaper and the Barbados National Carnival Commission. A Barbados court ruled in favor of the poultry farmers six years ago in their case against Barbados Rediffusion on legal technicalities and deferred the determination of damages to the appeals process.

The Barbados Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in June, and the broadcasters turned to the new Caribbean tribunal on Aug. 8. The high court set a November date for a final ruling.

Enthusiasm for the regional court is strong in the Caribbean, where London Privy Council rulings commuting dozens of death sentences have angered crime-rattled populations. Execution by hanging is the ultimate penalty in most of the region, and more than 80% of the people in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and other islands tell pollsters they expect to see it applied more under the new court.

The Judicial Committee of the London Privy Council, the final appeals court for a number of British Commonwealth members, is bound by a Council of Europe abolition of capital punishment. Some of its justices have struck down Caribbean death penalty rulings on moral rather than legal grounds.

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In reality, though, the Caribbean court is a long way from fully assuming the Commonwealth high court’s functions. Although 10 of the 15 Caribbean Community, or Caricom, states have endorsed the jurisdiction of the regional court in matters involving their plans to establish a common market, only two -- Guyana and Barbados -- have taken the legal steps to switch appellate jurisdiction from the Privy Council to the Caribbean Court of Justice.

The Caribbean panel will serve as a constitutional court for the single market initiative set to begin next year, interpreting and applying the treaty signed more than 30 years ago to pool the islands’ economic powers and prospects. At least six more Caricom states are expected to make it their appellate court in the next few years, after legislative steps or referendums.

A capital punishment case from Barbados is making its way to the Caribbean high court and will probably be the next issue taken up, said the panel’s Trinidadian president, Michael de la Bastide. But he dismissed public expectations that the new seven-judge body would prove to be a “hanging court.”

“The death penalty is very much of a red herring when it comes to this court,” said De la Bastide, a former chief justice of Trinidad. “There are certain issues on which we will be called upon to rule, but this is not the beginning and the end of our jurisprudence.”

The case of the allegedly defamed chickens has provided the new body with a brief respite before it tackles its first life-or-death decision.

“It can generate emotions, but certainly not in the same league with the death penalty,” De la Bastide said of the chicken case.

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Caribbean arbiters of culture note that constitutional issues are at stake, despite the levity the lawsuit has generated so far.

“There is a role for all artists -- poets, novelists, satirists -- to critique society,” said Kumar Mahabir, head of the Assn. of Caribbean Anthropologists. “But when it comes to personalities and businesses, as in the case of the Barbados incident, this can have disastrous effects.... There is a very thin and vague line dividing libel and poetic license.”

Mahabir contended that even calypso artists and those lampooning public figures during raucous celebrations had a responsibility to ground their jibes in “some kind of fact.”

He noted the increasingly polemical lyrics aimed at Trinidad’s Indian community by the predominantly Afro-Caribbean calypso artists, and said there was serious consideration being given to charges that some songs amounted to inciting ethnic violence.

Others are less concerned about holiday excesses becoming subject to litigation.

“I think Trinis are very liberal in the way we deal with Carnival. It’s very much a forgive-and-forget atmosphere,” said Dharmendra Punwasee, legal counsel for the Trinidad National Carnival Commission.

Making satirical swipes at those in power is a rich tradition in the Caribbean, said Gordon Rohlehr, a professor of literature at the University of the West Indies. He said he doubted that many targets would choose to make a high-profile case about it.

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“If you bring the matter of a calypsonian saying something outrageous or defamatory to court, the whole of society takes note,” Rohlehr said.

In the case of such mockery inflicting monetary losses, he said, the skilled calypso artist can skirt the free-speech issues and incumbent legal consequences with indirect references to the targets.

Sixteen years after the alleged Crop Over Festival defamation, details are fading from memory, but journalists who have followed the case say they don’t recall any specific references to the farm or its owners.

“The singers never called the name of the farm,” said Antoinette Connell, who is still covering the case for the Daily Nation. “But the name had been in the paper. People made the connection.”

Neither police nor health officials have ever clearly established the validity of claims that diseased chickens were sold, Connell said, although she recalled that there was some investigation after the initial controversy.

Attorneys for the Mirchandanis, as well as those representing the radio station, have refused to discuss a case that in effect demands a ruling on how much is too much when it comes to poking fun.

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“I’m sorry for them,” Rohlehr, the professor, said of the high court justices, “because I don’t think this is the kind of thing that can be defined.”

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