Pound home President’s ethical conduct message

THE EDITOR: In her “one year in office” interview, President Paula-Mae Weekes’ prior statement on ethical conduct in the legal profession came into focus again:

“For six years, I taught the course Ethics, Rights and Responsibilities of the Legal Profession. I was disappointed to find that a significant percentage of the students, among them scholarship winners and other high achievers, were lazy and dishonest, had a sense of entitlement and wanted maximum return for minimum effort. It was clear that these failings of character had been carried over from their earlier interaction with the education system.”

In explaining her prior statement, Weekes espoused that ethics isn’t “simply an examinable subject but rather something that would infiltrate your thinking on the whole as you practised.”

I applaud her statement because it cuts deeper into the depths of professionalism, where light may not shine on hard evidence. There is something very fundamental in TT society, that is currently lacking – the effort to walk with integrity and to be straightforward. Everyone needs to listen up, think more deeply about what the President has said and act positively.

Twenty years ago, the Nolan principles in the UK sought to improve standards in public life. These seven principles are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, leadership. At the time, these principles were revolutionary because they focused on behaviour and culture, rather than processes. You’d be hard-pushed to find anyone to argue against such noble values or that these principles do not apply to the legal or any professional in TT.

Not everybody who cuts corners or behaves unethically will be caught and put right by the disciplinary committee of the Law Association. The deeper concerns though are for those not caught and who create headaches and trouble for the courts and their clients. So, what does that mean? It means that only a small but “significant percentage” of those who are the worst performers will be caught. They can’t catch everybody who falls below the ethical dimensions of lawyering, so what you do have is to pound home the President’s message.

We cannot wait for unethical or unconscionable patterns of conduct to surface at the entry points of the legal profession or to come into the focus of the disciplinary body later on. The stakes are too high. Let’s put in place that moral and ethical education for a significant percentage of the students and their failings of character.

ULA NATHAI-LUTCHMAN

international criminal lawyer

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"Pound home President’s ethical conduct message"

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