the CSME are so important and extensive, relating to the establishment of economic enterprises, the provision of professional services, the movement of capital, the acquisition of land for the operation of businesses, that there is a clear need to have a permanent, central, regional institution to authoritatively and definitively pronounce on those rights and corresponding obligations. The Caribbean Court of Justice is intended to be such an authoritative institution." The official inauguration was held in Queen's Hall, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, on Saturday 16 April 2005. The first case heard by the CCJ was in August 2005 and was to settle a "decade-long" libel court case from Barbados. Barbados and Guyana acceded to the CCJ's appellate jurisdiction in 2005, with Belize joining them in June 2010, and Dominica in March 2015. Jurisdictional competition with the Privy Council The reasons given for the establishment of a supreme appellate court are many and varied, including a perceived regional disenfranchisement from the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Controversy surrounding the establishment of this court corresponds to two major events that made the Privy Council unpopular in the Caribbean region. One reason was the refusal of the Privy Council to allow capital punishment for persons convicted of murder (who had spent more than five years pursuing their various appeal options) to be practiced in Caribbean states, even where a majority of the people in the relevant jurisdictions supported the death penalty. In the 1993 case of Pratt v Attorney General of Jamaica, the Privy Council held that persons imprisoned on death row for more than five years should have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. The second main issue was a case in Antigua and Barbuda, Observer Publications v Matthew, where the Privy Council ruled that the government had acted unlawfully in refusing to consider an application for a broadcast radio station licence. Until the ruling, radio station licences had only been issued to members of the prime minister's family. The British-based court has been perceived as having too much power in the Caribbean region. Several politicians also lamented that the Caribbean nations are the only remaining region of the former British Empire still to rely on the British court system for appeals. Support from the British legal establishment for the CCJ over the JCPC for the Caribbean Paradoxically, even as some within the Caribbean oppose switching from the Privy