Af­ter a sit­ting which spanned more than six hours, the Pub­lic Health (Amend­ment) Bill, 2020 was passed with­out amend­ments in the Up­per House on Sat­ur­day.

The Gov­ern­ment's push to ex­pe­dite the law, which would see mem­bers of the pub­lic risk­ing a tick­etable of­fence should they fail to wear a mask in pub­lic, was the ur­gent mat­ter in the Sen­ate.

How­ev­er, the de­ci­sion to ad­just Par­lia­men­tary speak­ing time dur­ing this pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od was found un­favourable, not on­ly by the Op­po­si­tion as it had been in the Low­er House, but mem­bers of the In­de­pen­dent Bench as well.

Leader of Gov­ern­ment Busi­ness Franklin Khan moved the mo­tion to ad­just the speak­ing time dur­ing this pe­ri­od to 30 min­utes for the mover of the mo­tion and the clos­ing speak­er, and 20 min­utes for the all oth­er speak­ers.

This was ques­tioned by Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tor Wade Mark, who was im­me­di­ate­ly said the mo­tion was not up for de­bate. He, how­ev­er, was able to force a di­vi­sion vote.

When tak­en, un­sur­pris­ing­ly, the en­tire op­po­si­tion bench vot­ed against the ad­just­ments. But sev­en In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors, Dr Var­ma Deyals­ingh, An­tho­ny Vieira, Am­ri­ta De­onar­ine, Hazel Thomp­son-Ahye, Char­rise Seep­er­sad, Maria Dil­lon-Re­my and De­oroop Teemal all vot­ed no.

Paul Richards and Evans Welch vot­ed yes, al­low­ing the mo­tion to be passed as the count end­ed 17-13.

At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi, while in­tro­duc­ing the Pub­lic Health Amend­ment to the Up­per House ad­dressed the is­sue.

"All of these in­di­ca­tors demon­strate the grav­i­ty of the ma­te­r­i­al be­fore us and cer­tain­ly that grav­i­ty is to be found­ed in the knowl­edge that we are deal­ing with a glob­al pan­dem­ic. It is for that rea­son for a mo­ment ago we sus­pend­ed the stand­ing or­ders and ad­just­ed the time frame for speak­ing be­cause the re­al­i­ty is, this is not busi­ness as usu­al," said the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al.

De­spite

the ad­just­ment in speak­ing time, the sit­ting still ex­ceed­ed six and half hours with­out the Sen­ate tak­ing a lunch break as con­tri­bu­tions were made by all six Op­po­si­tion Sen­a­tors as well as sev­en In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors.

Maid­en con­tri­bu­tions were made by Jayan­ti Lutch­me­di­al and David Nahkid, who both ques­tioned the word­ing sur­round­ing the fixed penal­ty no­tices at­tached to the bill.

Lutch­me­di­al, how­ev­er, de­nied that she had a con­flict of in­ter­est in the de­bate, af­ter a query by the AG, due to her in­volve­ment in an on­go­ing case chal­leng­ing quar­an­tine or­ders un­der the pub­lic health or­di­nance.

She, how­ev­er, said the law need­ed to be ad­just­ed so that loop­holes would not po­ten­tial­ly bur­den the le­gal sys­tem fur­ther.

"What you are do­ing is not cre­at­ing more room for lit­i­ga­tion, the lit­i­ga­tion that you com­plain about. That the UNC lawyers go­ing to bring, well don't do that! Don't cre­ate room for lit­i­ga­tion, cre­ate a good law," Lutch­me­di­al said as she called for the law to be done sep­a­rate­ly to the Pub­lic Health or­di­nance.