Leading Article: The Law Lords have ducked their moral responsibility

THE HISTORIC links between Trinidad and the United Kingdom do not justify British judges doing Trinidad's dirty work. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was wrong to refuse to hear an appeal against the sentencing to death of a gang of Trinidadian drug smugglers, and thus allow them to hang. But it should not have been in the position of having to decide in the first place.

Trinidad - like other Commonwealth countries in the Caribbean - keeps Her Majesty's Privy Council as its supreme court. Given the small populations of many of the islands, and the resulting lack of legal expertise, such arrangements made sense after their independence from Britain. But their legal systems have matured and Caribbean lawyers are now more than equal to the task of overseeing their own courts. The Privy Council's role has become an unnecessary anachronism.

The people of the United Kingdom and the West Indies have different cultures and live in different conditions. Where, for example, homosexuality is tolerated in this country, in the West Indies it is still taboo. Acceptance of the death penalty is, however, where the two areas diverge most radically.

Cocaine has ravaged the Caribbean. South American drug traffickers have used the islets of the West Indies to store and transfer their drugs before transporting the narcotics to North America and Europe. Drug money has bought politicians and fuelled a cycle of murders. There is sympathy in this country for the islanders' plight, and understanding of their view that capital punishment is the only feasible deterrent. None the less, the judicial committee of the Privy Council was not obliged to support the wish of the Trinidad government for these men to hang.

However, Britain, in its remaining colonies in the West Indies, continues to resist the clamour for the increased use of judicial killing. A succession of votes in the Commons has made clear the country's abhorrence of the death penalty. The judges should have resisted all arguments that asked them to bow to the wishes of the Trinidadians. They had the right to intervene, and should have done so. It is abhorrent that British judges - who have been at the forefront of the fight to abolish the death penalty, not just in Britain but also on the continent of Europe - have allowed nine men to be executed, something which is illegal in this country.

The Privy Council may have worried that if it had protected the sanctity of life, it would have encouraged the formation of a potentially illiberal Caribbean Supreme Court. So it might have. But it is not the place of Britain to interfere with the legal systems of sovereign states. The Caribbean nations must take sole responsibility for their own legal killings.