Sascha Wil­son

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan yes­ter­day de­nied Sec­tion 34 of the Ad­min­is­tra­tion of Jus­tice (In­dictable Pro­ceed­ings) Act 2011 was a blun­der. In de­fend­ing the Gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion to re­peal the con­tro­ver­sial clause, which was pro­claimed on?Au­gust 27, Ram­lo­gan said the Gov­ern­ment was mere­ly be­ing "cau­tious." This comes days af­ter the Sun­day Guardian re­port­ed ex­clu­sive­ly busi­ness­men Ish Gal­barans­ingh and Steve Fer­gu­son, who are charged with fraud, could be set free un­der that sec­tion.

The AG made the state­ment to re­porters af­ter the launch of the Drug Treat­ment Court pi­lot project at City Hall, San Fer­nan­do. He said: "Hav­ing lis­tened to the con­cerns that have been ex­pressed, in light of the di­ver­gence of le­gal opin­ions ex­pressed about what could be the pos­si­ble in­ter­pre­ta­tions of Sec­tion 34, we de­cid­ed to err on the side of cau­tion and the Ho­n­ourable Prime Min­is­ter, in her wis­dom, de­cid­ed to con­vene Par­lia­ment to re­peal that sec­tion in its en­tire­ty to pre­clude any pos­si­bil­i­ty of any de­fen­dant avoid­ing a crim­i­nal tri­al which is nec­es­sary in the pub­lic in­ter­est."

He said the Gov­ern­ment felt very strong­ly that every­one was equal be­fore the law and must be sub­ject to the law. Asked if the re­peal was an ad­mis­sion the Gov­ern­ment had made a blun­der, he said: "No, I don't think so. I think in any law there is bound to be room for more than one in­ter­pre­ta­tion. "When you look at the sec­tion, it is pos­si­ble that a de­fen­dant can ar­gue that, look, I should not be tried. But when you look at it the oth­er way, it is equal­ly open to the pros­e­cu­tion and the state to re­sist that quite eas­i­ly.

"But rather than leave it to chance, we felt that the bet­ter thing to do in this case would be to re­peal it in its en­tire­ty."

Told there was a per­cep­tion that the clause was put there de­lib­er­ate­ly so Gal­barans­ingh and Fer­gu­son could walk free, he said: "Well, I think that is pre­pos­ter­ous, quite frankly. If that is so, then that means that the In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors, the en­tire Op­po­si­tion and the Gov­ern­ment were all par­ty to some­thing like that.

"I think quite frankly that is fan­ci­ful and our in­de­pen­dent bench, our Op­po­si­tion bench and in­deed the Gov­ern­ment... we pass laws not by ref­er­ence to per­son­al­i­ties, we pass laws by ref­er­ence to what we think is right and just." Re­spond­ing to Op­po­si­tion leader Dr Kei­th?Row­ley's call for him and Jus­tice Her­bert Vol­ney to re­sign, he said Row­ley should con­sid­er re­sign­ing as well, since he had sup­port­ed the mea­sure. "We need­ed a spe­cial ma­jor­i­ty," he point­ed out. "With­out Dr Row­ley's sup­port, this could nev­er have be­come law."