Veteran lawyer speaks out on divorce laws

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

BRADES, Montserrat (GIU): Kenneth Allen QC, President of the Montserrat Bar Association, says the idea of judicial separation has always been intricately bound up with religious practices in some people and some churches to use their own slogan ' did not believe in divorce.' The veteran barrister and solicitor says he doesn't recall a petition of judicial separation ever being filed in Montserrat.

"The laws of divorce must change to make the process quicker and easier. The long waiting period between the decree nisi and the decree absolute ought to be totally abolished, because the agony during that period of wait is strenuous and stressful," says lawyer Allen, who has been practising law in Montserrat and the wider Caribbean for 40 years.

He says it is " foolish to continue to think of marriage as a perfect institution when records show that in some countries 70 percent of the marriages fail and the breakdown is often bitter, sometimes cruel and always expensive."

Mr Allen made the observations at the opening of a one-day national consultation on the Montserrat leg of the OECS Family Law Reform and Domestic Violence Legal and Judicial Reform Project held the Red Cross Headquarters in Brades on Monday.

He says perhaps Montserrat has been lucky as in "this jurisdiction the court has always given special preference to hearing domestic matters."

"The minimum grounds for divorce should be and here I use a pun - should be the minimum - irretrievable breakdown in marriage. If a marriage has broken down as accepted by both parties to the extent where there is no hope of reconciliation, that should be the end of it and it should not take months, perhaps not weeks, perhaps not even days," says lawyer Allen, who has on more than one occasion served as a High Court Judge of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.

Lawyer Allen pledges the support of members of the Montserrat legal fraternity.

"The matters you are here to deal with are alive but they are not well.

But they must get better if we are to build a society for the 21st century that we see in imagination. Let all of us whom luck, divine providence, intellectual cunning or whatever have endowed with greater wisdom than the others put our heads and hearts together and help to build that new society," according to head of the Montserrat Bar Association. 

The respected attorney-at-law notes that as "civilisation advances the realm of morality grows and man's consciousness of moral relationships expand - we learn to recognise duties towards our neighbours trees and flowers and even inanimate objects."

Lawyer Allen continues: " Out of that recognition comes an awakening - how precious are children, how valuable is companionship (companionship of any kind) and without prompting we find the tolerance of differences develops and begins to turn into an acceptance that differences are a source of positive advantage. It is now easier to agree to disagree." 

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