Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Re­porter

gail.alexan­der@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Bar­ry Padarath has ac­cused the Law As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (LATT) of “se­lec­tive out­rage,” over its con­cerns on mat­ters raised by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar fol­low­ing Tues­day’s de­feat of the Gov­ern­ment’s Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions (ZOSO) Bill.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, Padarath slammed LATT, say­ing, “The truth is un­avoid­able; the Law As­so­ci­a­tion has no moral au­thor­i­ty to lec­ture this Gov­ern­ment. It for­feit­ed that au­thor­i­ty long ago by se­lec­tive­ly de­fend­ing the rule of law on­ly when it suit­ed its po­lit­i­cal and fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests.”

He added, “For years, LATT failed to ful­fil its man­date to pro­tect democ­ra­cy and con­sti­tu­tion­al in­tegri­ty. In­stead, it chose to play cheap par­ti­san pol­i­tics in ex­change for state briefs.

Padarath’s com­ments came in re­sponse to a state­ment is­sued by LATT yes­ter­day morn­ing.

De­fend­ing the Prime Min­is­ter, Padarath ac­cused the LATT of “PNM-friend­ly si­lence” over the past term.

“For ten years, while hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars flowed out of the pub­lic purse in le­gal fees, many with­in the le­gal fra­ter­ni­ty were too busy feed­ing at the PNM trough to trou­ble them­selves with prin­ci­ple.

“While PNM ‘eat-ah food-lawyers’ en­joyed the feed­ing fren­zy, the Law As­so­ci­a­tion sang in har­mo­ny with the PNM’s pre­ferred tune: say noth­ing, see noth­ing, chal­lenge noth­ing ....”

Padarath list­ed is­sues dur­ing the PNM’s term when he said the LATT’s pres­ence and voice were ab­sent.

He cit­ed the PNM’s clash­es with Au­di­tor Gen­er­al Jai­wantie Ram­dass, “il­le­gal­ly post­poned” lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions, al­leged in­ter­fer­ence in the ap­point­ment of a Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er, the Vin­cent Nel­son in­dem­ni­ty is­sue, the Brent Thomas “ab­duc­tion”, the Paria Pipeline tragedy and the Spe­cial Branch re­port al­leged­ly in­volv­ing a PNM sen­a­tor.

Padarath added, “Per­haps most telling of all: where was the Law As­so­ci­a­tion when an In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor stood in the Sen­ate and ad­mit­ted that two sit­ting Court of Ap­peal judges were pri­vate­ly en­gag­ing him in po­lit­i­cal­ly bi­ased con­ver­sa­tions at­tack­ing UNC Sen­a­tors, at a time when po­lit­i­cal­ly sen­si­tive mat­ters were be­fore the courts?”

“Where was the LATT press re­lease de­mand­ing that those judges be named? Where was the con­dem­na­tion of such bla­tant ju­di­cial mis­con­duct? Where was the call for ac­count­abil­i­ty? Did LATT de­mand the Sen­a­tor’s res­ig­na­tion? Or did it once again re­treat in­to its com­fort­able, PNM-friend­ly si­lence?”

—Gail Alexan­der