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Sunday, July 20, 2025

HRM back in court to block road works

by

20140204

Faced with re­peat­ed de­lays in its law­suit and the State's ap­par­ent in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion of con­struc­tion works, the High­way Re-route Move­ment (HRM) yes­ter­day ap­plied for an ur­gent in­ter­im in­junc­tion to stop work on the dis­put­ed Debe to Mon De­sir seg­ment of the Solomon Ho­choy High­way ex­ten­sion.The group's at­tor­neys made the move at a hear­ing be­fore Jus­tice James Aboud in the Port-of-Spain High Court, in which the State was due to re­spond to a sim­i­lar ap­pli­ca­tion for an in­junc­tion filed al­most four months ago.

That ap­pli­ca­tion has been blight­ed by a se­ries of pro­ce­dur­al de­lays, in­clud­ing the State's ap­pli­ca­tion last No­vem­ber for Aboud's re­cusal, which he even­tu­al­ly dis­missed last month.In mak­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion, the group's lead at­tor­ney, Ramesh Lawrence Ma­haraj, SC, said his clients could not wait for the first ap­pli­ca­tion to be de­ter­mined, as the State had ramped up con­struc­tion at the site since the be­gin­ning of this month.

"This is a cal­cu­lat­ed at­tempt to de­stroy the sub­ject mat­ter of this case. The court can­not con­done this de­struc­tion," Ma­haraj said.He said if the case were to pro­ceed at its cur­rent pace, the con­struc­tion at the site would reach an ad­vanced stage be­fore the first ap­pli­ca­tion was de­ter­mined, leav­ing the re­liefs be­ing sought by his clients use­less.Se­nior Coun­sel Rus­sell Mar­tineau, who is lead­ing the State's le­gal team, op­posed the HRM's lat­est le­gal chal­lenge, de­scrib­ing it as pos­si­ble abuse of process.

"I'm not say­ing you (Aboud) can­not deal with this ap­pli­ca­tion. I would say the court should not," Mar­tineau said.Aboud or­dered that both par­ties should file their sub­mis­sions on the is­sue over the week­end and grant­ed the HRM an ex­pe­dit­ed hear­ing next Tues­day morn­ing.He de­scribed the case as the "most im­por­tant in a decade" and said it de­served an ur­gent hear­ing.

In their sub­stan­tive con­sti­tu­tion­al mo­tion, which is yet to go on tri­al be­fore Aboud, the mem­bers of the group are con­tend­ing that the Gov­ern­ment breached its con­sti­tu­tion­al rights by build­ing the con­tro­ver­sial sec­tion of the high­way with­out prop­er con­sul­ta­tion of the res­i­dents.It is al­so chal­leng­ing the de­struc­tion of its Debe camp by a group of sol­diers in June 2012 un­der the al­leged in­struc­tions of then na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty min­is­ter Jack Warn­er .

It claims it had a le­git­i­mate ex­pec­ta­tion that the Gov­ern­ment would abide by a 700-page tech­ni­cal re­port which was pre­pared by a team of 17 pro­fes­sion­als led by for­mer In­de­pen­dent sen­a­tor Dr James Arm­strong.The re­port which was pro­duced fol­low­ing a 21-day hunger strike by the group's leader, en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist Dr Wayne Kublals­ingh, out­side the Prime Min­is­ter's Of­fice, rec­om­mend­ed that con­struc­tion work should stop im­me­di­ate­ly to al­low fur­ther sci­en­tif­ic as­sess­ment.


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