JENSEN LA VENDE

Se­nior Re­porter

jensen.lavende@guardian.co.tt

The Privy Coun­cil has ruled that the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of a re­tired fire­man, who was by­passed for a pro­mo­tion on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions, were breached and or­dered the High Court to as­sess what pos­si­ble dam­ages he is owed.

Siew­nar­ine Ram­saran, who was rep­re­sent­ed by Anand Ram­lo­gan, SC, and Jodie Black­stock, had sued the of­fice of the Chief Fire Of­fi­cer, the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (PSC) and the Of­fice of the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, claim­ing his rights un­der sec­tions 4(b) and 4(d) of the Con­sti­tu­tion were breached.

The State bod­ies were rep­re­sent­ed by Rowan Pen­ning­ton-Ben­ton and Charles Rus­sell Speechlys.

Law Lords Philip Sales, Nicholas Ham­blen, George Leg­gatt, An­drew Bur­rows and Ben Stephens found that Ram­saran was de­nied a fair op­por­tu­ni­ty to be con­sid­ered for ap­point­ment as act­ing Deputy Chief Fire Of­fi­cer (DC­FO), the sec­ond-high­est of­fice in the fire ser­vice.

The five-mem­ber pan­el last Fri­day found that one of the main fac­tors in as­sess­ing dam­ages was the like­li­hood of Ram­saran, who joined the fire ser­vice in 1979 and re­tired in 2022, be­ing ap­point­ed in­stead of Mervyn Layne.

The crux of Ram­saran’s case was that as a se­nior of­fi­cer to Layne, he was by­passed for the act­ing po­si­tion twice in 2019 and once in 2020.

The rea­sons for his non-ap­point­ment were that in March 2019, the po­si­tion was not ad­ver­tised, then in May that year, he lacked the In­ter­na­tion­al Brigade Com­mand Course (IBCC) qual­i­fi­ca­tion, stip­u­lat­ed in the job de­scrip­tion, and for not sat­is­fy­ing the req­ui­site “ex­pe­ri­ence cri­te­ri­on.” Layne, who had the IBCC, was again ap­point­ed.

Ram­saran suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed the IBCC in Au­gust 2019 and ap­plied in 2020 for the act­ing po­si­tion again.

How­ev­er, he was again by­passed in 2020, that time be­cause he did not sat­is­fy the ex­pe­ri­ence cri­te­ri­on of six years at a se­nior man­age­r­i­al/ad­min­is­tra­tive lev­el.

At the time, he was a Di­vi­sion­al Fire Of­fi­cer (DFO) and served as act­ing As­sis­tant Chief Fire Of­fi­cer (AC­FO) on sev­er­al oc­ca­sions.

Dur­ing his ini­tial law­suit, it was found that Ram­saran’s time as act­ing AC­FO was suf­fi­cient to meet the ex­pe­ri­ence cri­te­ri­on.

The court al­so found that there was a breach of sec­tion 4(d) of his con­sti­tu­tion­al rights af­ter he ob­tained the IBCC, as both he and Layne were el­i­gi­ble, but on­ly Layne was put for­ward.

The State ap­pealed and the ap­pel­late judges found that the rank of di­vi­sion­al fire of­fi­cer and above count­ed as the re­quired ex­pe­ri­ence and, there­fore, Ram­saran did not need to be no­ti­fied of the va­can­cy un­der Reg­u­la­tion 155 of the Pub­lic Ser­vice Com­mis­sion.

The Privy Coun­cil found that Ram­saran was el­i­gi­ble for con­sid­er­a­tion, in keep­ing with Reg­u­la­tion 9 from March 2019.

It al­so found that both the High Court and Court of Ap­peal erred by as­sum­ing that el­i­gi­bil­i­ty re­quired sat­is­fy­ing the re­quire­ments set out in the job de­scrip­tion.

“Con­trary to the ap­proach of the Court of Ap­peal, this spec­i­fied re­quire­ment could not be treat­ed as an ab­solute cut-off af­fect­ing the ap­pel­lant, so as to rule out his ap­point­ment as act­ing DC­FO,” the Privy Coun­cil ruled.

The Privy Coun­cil found that fair­ness re­quires pub­lic bod­ies to “give fair no­tice of mat­ters which will bear up­on a de­ci­sion whether to ap­point an ap­pli­cant, in­clud­ing by in­di­cat­ing more clear­ly than was done in the job de­scrip­tion if any mat­ter was to be treat­ed as an ab­solute re­quire­ment.”

The coun­cil said there was a “whole­sale fail­ure” in how Layne’s ap­point­ment was done, adding that there was no way for Ram­saran to be ap­point­ed to the po­si­tion now.

“The on­ly rem­e­dy avail­able in ju­di­cial re­view was some form of de­clara­to­ry re­lief, which would not con­sti­tute a “prompt and ef­fec­tive le­gal rem­e­dy” in re­spect of the detri­ment he has suf­fered as a re­sult of the breach of his rights,” the board found.