The Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) has spoken, and it could not have been clearer. In a scathing judgment, the region’s highest court dismissed Allen Chastanet’s appeal in the long-running customs case involving Dr. Ernest Hilaire, describing it as “legally misconceived” and “an unnecessary consumption of judicial resources.”
After nearly a decade of political and legal theatrics, Chastanet’s campaign to discredit his political rival has ended where it perhaps always belonged, on the losing side of reason and law.
The CCJ’s decision is more than just another courtroom defeat for the former Prime Minister. It is a stinging rebuke of his persistent misuse of public institutions to pursue personal vendettas. The Court’s remarks about the illogicality of his arguments, calling his reliefs “nonsense” underline a troubling pattern: an inclination toward spectacle over substance, and grievance over governance.
At the heart of the matter was the importation of Dr. Hilaire’s Land Rover Discovery, a dispute inflated by Chastanet into a political crusade. The CCJ, echoing the lower courts, reaffirmed what has long been obvious: there was no legal foundation for his appeal. In the words of the Justices, the very logic of his claim “could not stand.”
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Perhaps the most telling line in the entire judgment is the Court’s lament that so much “judicial time and effort” had been wasted on this matter, time that “could have been better spent.” That observation should resonate deeply with every Saint Lucian who has watched this saga unfold. For nearly ten years, valuable national energy and resources have been drained by one man’s relentless obsession with trying to tarnish another’s name.
Dr. Hilaire’s response was appropriately restrained yet cutting. “Allen Chastanet, for almost ten years, has spared no effort in trying to destroy my reputation. He has failed at every turn. He has failed again today,” he wrote. His statement not only captured personal vindication but also echoed the nation’s collective fatigue with the politics of division and distraction.
It is time, as Hilaire suggested, for Allen Chastanet to “stop the unnecessary consumption of judicial resources.” Saint Lucia faces real challenges, economic, social, and environmental, that require leadership grounded in integrity and purpose, not ego and retribution.
This ruling is a victory not only for Dr. Hilaire but also for the rule of law and the principle that public office must never be used as a weapon for personal grudges. Chastanet’s repeated failures in court are not unfortunate coincidences, they are the inevitable outcome of a leader who has mistaken power for privilege and political opposition for personal enmity.
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The CCJ has closed this chapter. The rest is up to Saint Lucians to decide: whether they continue indulging a politics of spite or move forward toward a politics of substance.
