For­mer prime min­is­ter Stu­art Young has de­fend­ed the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) ad­min­is­tra­tion’s han­dling of bor­der clo­sures dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, dis­miss­ing crit­i­cisms by for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan as “un­ac­cept­able” and po­lit­i­cal­ly mo­ti­vat­ed.

Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day at the Of­fice of the Op­po­si­tion Leader in Port-of-Spain, Young re­ject­ed Ram­lo­gan’s call for the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) and two for­mer min­is­ters to “bow their heads in shame” fol­low­ing a Court of Ap­peal rul­ing ear­li­er this week.

The rul­ing found that the State’s fail­ure to pub­lish ex­emp­tion cri­te­ria dur­ing the pan­dem­ic had breached the con­sti­tu­tion­al rights of two women.

“How many have ac­tu­al­ly read the de­ci­sion of the Court of Ap­peal?” Young asked.

“The court de­cid­ed a very nar­row point—that it was un­con­sti­tu­tion­al for the gov­ern­ment, and for me as min­is­ter of na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty at the time, not to pub­lish the poli­cies and cri­te­ria ap­plied in grant­i­ng ex­emp­tions. That is all it was.”

Cit­ing Jus­tice of Ap­peal Pe­ter Bereaux’s writ­ten de­ci­sion, Young stressed the court up­held the State’s au­thor­i­ty to lim­it re-en­try dur­ing the pub­lic health emer­gency, but said such pow­ers re­quired trans­paren­cy.

He not­ed that more than 5,700 ex­emp­tion re­quests had been re­ceived be­tween March and Ju­ly 2020, when quar­an­tine space and health fa­cil­i­ties were se­vere­ly lim­it­ed.

“Our pol­i­cy was clear: you could on­ly al­low peo­ple back in if there was quar­an­tine space, be­cause we were try­ing to pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion and save lives,” Young said. “To char­ac­terise it in the way Anand Ram­lo­gan has is not on­ly mis­lead­ing, but un­ac­cept­able.”

He em­pha­sised the judg­ment was not a con­dem­na­tion of the then gov­ern­ment’s over­all COVID-19 re­sponse but a rul­ing lim­it­ed to the non-dis­clo­sure of ex­emp­tion cri­te­ria dur­ing the first months of the pan­dem­ic.

Quot­ing from the de­ci­sion, he said: “Jus­tice Bereaux made it clear that Cab­i­net faced a very dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion. He ac­knowl­edged that de­ci­sions neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed peo­ple, but al­so recog­nised that through the ef­forts of the ex­ec­u­tive, Trinidad and To­ba­go sur­vived large­ly un­scathed. Five years lat­er, it is easy with hind­sight to ap­por­tion blame.”

He al­so re­mind­ed re­porters that T&T’s pan­dem­ic man­age­ment was recog­nised in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, in­clud­ing praise from the World Health Or­ga­ni­za­tion.

Turn­ing his fire on Ram­lo­gan, Young said: “If there is any­one who should hang their head in shame in this coun­try, it is a for­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al who is be­fore the crim­i­nal courts with charges of wit­ness tam­per­ing and oth­er breach­es of crim­i­nal law. Cer­tain­ly not the ded­i­cat­ed pub­lic health of­fi­cials who did a mag­nif­i­cent job of sav­ing lives.”

The Court of Ap­peal rul­ing con­firmed that while the State had law­ful au­thor­i­ty to re­strict en­try, its fail­ure to pub­lish the ex­emp­tion cri­te­ria in a time­ly man­ner breached con­sti­tu­tion­al rights.

Young in­sist­ed the rul­ing should not be mis­rep­re­sent­ed as a blan­ket con­dem­na­tion of the gov­ern­ment’s COVID-19 man­age­ment but rather as a tech­ni­cal find­ing on trans­paren­cy dur­ing an un­prece­dent­ed cri­sis.