It’s often said that still waters run deep. The soft-spoken, mild exterior of John Jeremie belies a hard-bitten lawyer with a steely resolve and an incisive legal brain.
The new High Commissioner for Trinidad and Tobago arrives in London after four gruelling years as the Caribbean island’s combative attorney general.
“It’s not easy being attorney general in the Caribbean in the context of a multi-racial society like Trinidad,” he smiles ruefully. “Tensions are not overt but there are tensions and they get to elevated levels around election time.”
The population is roughly divided equally into people of Indian and African origin and voting still tends to be generally along ethnic lines. Decisions of the attorney general are therefore taken in a charged political atmosphere.
During his tour of duty Jeremie worked with the Ministry of National Security on the island’s spiralling crime, much of it due to the drug trade; they kept a watchful eye on Trinidad’s small radical Muslim group Jamaat al Muslimeen, responsible for a botched coup attempt in 1990; and Jeremie made himself a target by extraditing terror suspects to the US.
During his period of time in office the Chief Justice was charged with misconduct. “It was one of the more unsavoury aspects of my tenure but it was work which was required to be done” he says.
He got involved in regional issues too, resolving a territorial dispute with Barbados, and battling against detractors in the Caribbean to bring into being the Caribbean Court of Justice.
“Some of our neighbours were convinced it was not a good idea but we pushed ahead. There were very difficult meetings that I attended. I found myself in a very lonely place at times. But we pursued it and now the court is up and running,” says the High Commissioner, who says this achievement was the highlight of his tenure.
Although the court, which is based in the capital, Port of Spain, is not fully functional (it is hoped that the court will replace Britain’s Privy Council as the final court of appeal in time), the CCJ can now rule on regional trade disputes.
The High Commissioner, who has taken time out of his academic career, sees this London posting as something of a respite after the long hours he put in as attorney general.
Not that it’s going to be quiet. This year Trinidad and Tobago plays host to two huge summits, first the Summit of the Americas in April and then the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November – the theme of which will be ‘Partnering for a more equitable and sustainable future.’
A secretariat has been established to organise both summits but with the Commonwealth’s headquarters in London, the High Commission is bracing itself for quite a bit of traffic.
The Summit of the Americas promises to be interesting too, says Jeremie, with Trinidad forming a geographical and political bridge between the US, Latin America and the Caribbean. “It’s the first summit in our hemisphere that Barack Obama will attend and it promises to be very interesting,” says Jeremie.
An expert in international finance law, Jeremie says his main job in London is to act as a “scout” on how Britain and Europe will respond to the financial crisis that he predicted 15 years ago.
As a post-grad student at King’s College, he wrote a prescient paper in 1995, in which he said the unregulated buying and selling of risky financial instruments such as swaps and derivatives would result in a financial meltdown.
“I found it astonishing that the former chief of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, would allow the banks to develop these instruments and then allow them to self-regulate and pay themselves huge bonuses tied to short-term gains and paying no heed to the nature of the debt contained in the instruments. I think having greed as a motivating factor blinded the banks. It was a recipe for disaster.”
At the time he recommended a global system of regulation because of the global nature of the new instruments.
“I think that is what Britain is trying to push the rest of Europe towards right now so I will be following the G20 summit in London this April very closely,” says the High Commissioner.
The deficiencies in the regulatory system will be patched up, he says, but that will not be the panacea.“The damage has been done. The banks are suspicious of each other, and it’s going to take time for them to trust each other again. It’s going to be difficult for the world economy.”
It’s not hard to guess how High Commissioner Jeremie will be spending his downtime in London: “I am writing a follow-up article on the financial crisis,” he says. Watch this space.
