In Unitas?

On this Trinity Sunday, I am horrified to hear that a court last month found the Trinity Cross of the Order of Trinity, the highest honour in Trinidad and Tobago, to infringe both in its name and in its shape the rights of the applicants, who happened to be Hindus and Muslims.

Not least as a descendant both of African slaves and of Indian indentured labourers, I am delighted that there is still a right of appeal to the court in question even though Trinidad and Tobago abolished the monarchy in 1976, and has never elected a President from the Indian half of her population, which seems a rather more significant breach of Hindus’ and Muslims’ rights to equality, equality of treatment, and freedom of conscience and belief, the provisions of the 1976 Constitution cited in this case. Monarchies are honest, since they make no pretence either to egalitarianism or to meritocracy.

But the identity of the court is question only makes this ruling even more shocking and terrifying. For this was a unanimous ruling of five Law Lords sitting in Downing Street as the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

(Since the Privy Council is of course Her Majesty’s Privy Council, and the Law Lords are of course Peers of Her Majesty’s Realm, there is a question as to whether Trinidad and Tobago really is a republic as that word is ordinarily understood. Just as there is with regard to Fiji, divided almost exactly between Indians and the Melanesians whose Great Council of Chiefs elects the President while acknowledging a Paramount Chief whose face therefore adorns both the currency and the stamps. Guess who?)

Such provisions are now written into the law of this country, too. So far, our own Hindus, Muslims and others have been the last people to bring actions of this kind, seeking rulings that things like the Victoria Cross are somehow breaches of their human rights. I can’t imagine many Gurkhas or Sikhs warming to that one. But the likes of the National Secular Society are another matter entirely.

No, a precedent has not been set; Trinidad and Tobago is a sovereign state which happens to share our final court of appeal, as fifteen other sovereign states happen to share our Head of State. But the judges would be the same people, and that matters at least as much. Here and in much of the Commonwealth, every public manifestation of a Christian heritage is now in immediate and mortal danger.