Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Pub­lic Ser­vice As­so­ci­a­tion (PSA) pres­i­dent Wat­son Duke wants his Au­gust 2019 sedi­tion charge dropped in light of the rul­ing by jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad ear­li­er this week pro­nounc­ing sec­tions 3 and 4 of the act to in­fringe on the rights of an in­di­vid­ual.

“I have been a vic­tim of bad jus­tice...when we go to court, my at­tor­neys are pre­pared to ask that this mat­ter be dropped com­plete­ly be­cause the ho­n­ourable Frank Seep­er­sad ruled that the law is il­le­gal. It is null, void, and has no ef­fect,” Duke said in a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day.

The se­di­tion charge against Duke re­lates to state­ments on pro­posed lay­offs at TSTT, T&TEC, and WASA, which he made in a press con­fer­ence on No­vem­ber 16, 2018.

Duke re­port­ed­ly said: “We must be pre­pared to die, folks, You know why? This is your be­lief, this is your fam­i­ly, and I am send­ing the mes­sage clear, let Row­ley them know that the day they come for us in WASA, we are pre­pared to die and the morgue would be pick­ing up peo­ple.”

But on Mon­day, Jus­tice Seep­er­sad struck down el­e­ments of this coun­try’s co­lo­nial-age se­di­tion leg­is­la­tion. He ruled that the leg­is­la­tion is vague, un­cer­tain and can lead to ar­bi­trary ap­pli­ca­tion.

He al­so ruled that the leg­is­la­tion is not com­pat­i­ble with a sov­er­eign de­mo­c­ra­t­ic state as it lim­its con­sti­tu­tion­al rights to free­dom of thought and ex­pres­sion and free­dom of the press.

The nov­el con­sti­tu­tion­al chal­lenge was brought by for­mer sec­re­tary-gen­er­al of the Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha (SDMS), the late Sat­narayan Ma­haraj, be­fore his death in No­vem­ber, last year.

In the law­suit, Ma­haraj’s lawyers con­tend­ed that the leg­is­la­tion—which was passed in 1920 and amend­ed sev­er­al times be­tween 1961 and 1976—breached cit­i­zens’ con­sti­tu­tion­al rights to free­dom of thought and ex­pres­sion, free­dom of the press and free­dom of as­so­ci­a­tion and as­sem­bly.