Richard Lord

The Gov­ern­ment se­cured pas­sage of the con­tro­ver­sial Bail (Amend­ment) Bill af­ter ma­jor amend­ments dur­ing yes­ter­day's five-hour marathon ses­sion of the Com­mit­tee Stage.The Gov­ern­ment agreed to amend a ma­jor pro­vi­sion re­gard­ing the de­nial of bail clause. Sev­en In­de­pen­dents vot­ed with the Gov­ern­ment while two vot­ed with the six Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tors against the mea­sure. In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor Sub­has Ramkhelawan, who vot­ed with the Gov­ern­ment said he sup­port­ed the bill af­ter the amend­ment was made.

The bill was pre­sent­ed by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan.Ramkhelawan said un­der the orig­i­nal bill, some­one with a pre­vi­ous con­vic­tion would be de­nied bail for 120 days. He said the leg­is­la­tion was not clear on what would have hap­pened af­ter that pe­ri­od had ex­pired. He said if ev­i­dence was brought with that pe­ri­od, what hap­pened af­ter was not clear on whether the ac­cused could seek bail be­fore a judge or not.

He said the in­tent of the leg­is­la­tion as was brought orig­i­nal­ly sug­gest­ed that bail would not be grant­ed un­til the mat­ter was com­plete­ly de­cid­ed."The main con­cern was that some­body could be charged and be held in cus­tody for five or sev­en years or how­ev­er long it takes for the mat­ter to be de­ter­mined," Ramkhewlawan said in an in­ter­view last night."That was seen by many sen­a­tors to be too oner­ous a bur­den on any cit­i­zen.

"There was some ne­go­ti­a­tion and the max­i­mum amount of time some­body can be held on a charge with­out bail was one year."He said that means if the mat­ter was not heard and com­plet­ed with­in one year, then that per­son would be en­ti­tled to bail be­fore a judge.Ramkhelawan said that was the main area of con­tention and once that mat­ter was set­tled, a num­ber of sen­a­tors ac­cept­ed the bill with some oth­er changes.