Former President Paula-Mae Weekes said she intends to pursue her career of providing judicial legal education for judges and lawyers which she had planned before becoming the country's sixth president in March 2018.
On March 20, former Senate president Christine Kangaloo succeeded Weekes becoming the country's seventh president.
"I want to do some form of public service, but nothing that will confine me to certain hours and days,” Weekes said during a pre-recorded interview with Ardene Sirjoo which was broadcast on i95.5 FM on Friday,
Among the changes she was looking forward to was not having people around her all the time, as well as being able to do things spontaneously without having to give notice to a security detail.
“I will miss not having had to cook for the last five years, and not having to find my own parking space, but I will make that trade-off to get back my autonomy. I will be travelling more, and I want to go back to providing judicial legal education for judges and lawyers, which I had planned to do before becoming president."
After her retirement from the Judiciary as a Court of Appeal judge in 2016, Weekes had served as executive director of PMW Criminal Justice Consultancy and Training – a small outfit providing services geared towards the development of the criminal justice sector.
According to a foreword on PMW Criminal Justice Consultancy and Training, it aimed to provide training and consultancy services for the criminal justice sector, primarily for police officers, attorneys-at-law and judicial officers, both locally and regionally.
In the notice, Weekes referred to her 11-year career as a Court of Appeal judge where "it was my job to scrutinise the work of magistrates and criminal trial court judges for errors they might have made as they conducted trials. I operated at the penultimate stage of the criminal justice system."
The notice said before her elevation to the Court of Appeal, Weekes served as criminal trial judge for nine years where she "had the opportunity to observe the good, bad and ugly of criminal advocacy. My 20 years on the bench proved to be a mixed bag of satisfaction and disappointment at the workings of the criminal justice system, of which the court is an integral part.
One of the frustrations of my work on the bench was to see fatal errors that could have been avoided by simple, but effective, training of the stakeholders and minor tweaking of the system. Out of that frustration, PMWCJCT was born. It occurred to me that rather than correcting problems at the back end, it would be a better use of my knowledge and experience to attempt to prevent them in the first place. PMWCJCT’s mission is to provide coherent, holistic advice and training to the criminal justice sector. For too long training initiatives have been unfocused and piecemeal reducing overall effectiveness and resulting in low returns for the resources invested. While the training must, of necessity, be incremental, the overview and planning needs to be panoramic." Weekes also had a 11
