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Friday, February 28, 2025

EOT head denies bias in Veera Bhajan case

by

483 days ago
20231104

Se­nior Re­porter

an­na-lisa.paul@guardian.co.tt

At­tor­neys rep­re­sent­ing the chair­man of the Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ty Tri­bunal (EOT) Don­na Prow­ell-Raphael yes­ter­day ap­pealed a rul­ing by Jus­tice Ava­son Quin­lan-Williams that the EOT head act­ed il­le­gal­ly to pre­vent lay as­ses­sor Veera Bha­jan from tak­ing up du­ty in March 2021 on the grounds of bias.

Ap­pear­ing be­fore Jus­tices of Ap­peal Mi­ra Dean-Ar­mor­er, Vasheist Kokaram and Mal­colm Holdip at a vir­tu­al hear­ing, Prow­ell-Ra­pa­hel’s lead at­tor­ney, Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj, SC, ar­gued that Quin­lan-Williams erred in law and asked for the mat­ter be as­signed to an­oth­er judge.

How­ev­er, Bha­jan’s at­tor­ney Alvin Fitz­patrick, SC, and Rishi Dass, SC, who ap­peared for the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, called for the ap­peal to be dis­missed.

Lawrence Ma­haraj de­scribed the mat­ter as one of the worst cas­es of ap­par­ent bias he had wit­nessed through­out his ca­reer as an at­tor­ney. He said the claims lev­eled against Prow­ell-Raphael dur­ing the hear­ing be­fore Quin­lan-Williams had not been is­sues raised be­fore the court and the judge had been bi­ased to al­low the in­tem­per­ate lan­guage which gave rise to the claim of bias.

At­tor­neys for Bha­jan and the AG de­nied this, ar­gu­ing in­stead that Quin­lan-Williams had been jus­ti­fied in her find­ings and there had been suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence to al­low for a case of mal­ice and bad faith. As such, the judge had been cor­rect in mak­ing cer­tain state­ments, they said.

A sta­tus hear­ing has been sched­uled for No­vem­ber 29.

Five months af­ter she was ap­point­ed as a lay-as­ses­sor of the EOT by Pres­i­dent Paula-Mae Weekes, Bha­jan, an at­tor­ney who is dif­fer­ent­ly-abled, threat­ened to sue af­ter al­leged­ly be­ing blocked from tak­ing up the po­si­tion.

Bha­jan, who was born with­out arms, was award­ed the Hum­ming­bird Medal (Sil­ver) in 2011.

Prow­ell-Raphael had pre­vi­ous­ly filed two ap­peals over Quin­lan-Williams’ han­dling of the law­suit brought by Bha­jan.


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