Attorney General Allyson Maynard-Gibson said Saturday that the Supreme Court Registry is "in dire need of evaluation, repair and process reengineering".

However, Bahamas Bar Association (BBA) President Elsworth Johnson yesterday dismissed her remarks made at the BBA's retreat as "lip service".

According to Maynard-Gibson, a senior lawyer told her, "Quite frankly the present state of the registry leaves much to be desired and is an impediment to the entire legal system."

Johnson noted that the registry has been in a deplorable state for years, despite calls by successive chief justices to improve its condition.

"In 2015, for the AG to talk about the registry without doing anything about it, is just paying lip service," he said.

"This is not something that's new; this is something the courts have been speaking about for years. The fault for this has to be laid squarely at the feet at the executive."

Johnson continued, "To my mind for the AG to now say there is a problem is just lip service. It has not just a national repercussion... but it has international repercussions.

"Nobody wants to know they have a matter in the system and their file can go missing, or that their file is in a building not fit for habitation, rats walking on them, and being wet by the rain and dried by the sun. The time for talk is over."

According to Johnson, Chief Justice Sir Hartman Longley had recently "identified a number of new files, almost 10 years old, that the court has not dealt with as yet because of the breakdown in the registry."

Johnson pointed out that the executive is responsible for making funds available to the judiciary. He noted that the $12 million that was "wasted" on carnival could have been applied to critical areas of the judiciary like the registry.

Johnson said that the problems in the registry should not be new to the AG, or past and present prime ministers, who as lawyers would have had firsthand experience with the state of the registry.

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