Governor Rena Lalgie has appointed former Chief Justice Ian Kawaley to Bermuda’s Court of Appeal.
Kawaley, 67, will take up the post in January.
Lalgie said: “Dr Kawaley’s appointment brings a wealth of valuable knowledge and insight to the Court of Appeal from his extensive judicial experience in Bermuda’s courts over the past 19 years.”
Kawaley was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1978 and joined the Bermuda Bar two years later.
He started out as a crown counsel and went into private practice in 1985 before becoming a puisne judge in 2003. He served as chief justice from 2012 until 2018 and has been an assistant justice since then. He is also a grand court judge in the Cayman Islands.
Ian Kawaley found himself in the spotlight after same-sex marriage was made legal in Bermuda in 2017. But the law was reversed last year under the Domestic Partnership Act (DPA) which came into effect in March this year following a series of appeals that went all the way to the Privy Council in London.
To date, Bermuda is the only country in the world to make same-sex marriage legal and then roll back the law to make it unlawful.
Privy Council judges found that the DPA – which confined marriage to between a man and a woman – was not unconstitutional.
Then Chief Justice Kawaley, in a ruling in 2018, had found that the parts of the legislation that restricted marriage to opposite-sex couples were against the Bermuda constitution.
The island’s Court of Appeal later upheld his ruling and allowed same-sex marriages to take place again, but the Progressive Labour Party government refused to give up, pointing to a non-binding 2016 referendum introduced by the then One Bermuda Alliance administration, in which the majority of voters opposed same-sex marriage in a low turn-out at the polls.
The attorney general then took the case to the Privy Council.
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