Friday, September 11 2009

THE GOVERNMENT will table a validation act to cure the legal blunder which has beset the Uff Commission of Inquiry, sources indicated yesterday.

Newsday understands attorneys for the Office of the Attorney General, who were charged with the task of advising Attorney General John Jeremie over whether or not such an act of Parliament could cure the defect, have given the go-ahead for the legislation to be tabled.

As such the Government is expected to today announce the tabling of such an act in Parliament as the 2010 Budget debate kicks-off. However it is unclear when debate on such a bill, once drafted, would be facilitated.

The last time a validation act was tabled in Parliament was December 2008. On that occasion the Government tabled the Elections and Boundaries Commission (Local Government and Tobago House of Assembly) (Amendment and Validation) Act. That act aimed at curing omissions in the EBC Act in relation to the definition of local boundaries for Tobago. A much older precedent was the tabling of a validation act to protect proceedings under the Narcotics Act in 1980.

The legality of the Uff Commission of Inquiry came under question this week when it emerged that the proceedings had not been gazetted as per Section 15 of the Commission of Inquiries Act.

Section 15 of the Commissions of Inquiry Act stipulates that “all commissions under this Act and all revocations of any such commission, shall be published in the Gazette, and shall take effect from the date of publication.”

That section has been found by the Privy Council to be a condition precedent for the validity of inquiry proceedings. In the 2007 St Vincent and the Grenadines case of Joachim v Attorney General it was held that a section similar to Section 16 made the proceedings ineffective until gazetted.

On Monday, Newsday reported the Attorney General had instructed his lawyers to examine the possibility of a validation act being tabled to cure the blunder which he that day described as “embarrassing.”

“I don’t think it will happen again, it was a basic error; it ought not to have happened,” Jeremie said. And while the inquiry chairman Professor John Uff has called the issue of gazetting “a formality” that can be cured. Diego Martin West MP Dr Keith Rowley has called on the Government to table a validation act “out of an abundance of caution”.