Geisha Kow­lessar

Ram­lo­gan has done noth­ing wrong in say­ing it was the AG's re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to ad­vise the Cab­i­net on mat­ters of law, usu­al­ly ap­plied to civ­il court mat­ters as op­posed to crim­i­nal mat­ters, since the Min­istry of Jus­tice was specif­i­cal­ly de­signed to deal with crim­i­nal mat­ters. Se­nior at­tor­ney and for­mer High Court judge Lar­ry Lal­la said there were few lawyers who prac­tised both crim­i­nal and civ­il law.

He added: "Noth­ing is ex­cep­tion­al with that. Most law prac­tion­eers ei­ther know civ­il or crim­i­nal law... they don't know both. The num­ber of se­nior prac­tion­eers who know both are very few and noth­ing is wrong with the at­tor­ney gen­er­al say­ing that...whether in fact this is the case we do not know." Lal­la said, hav­ing re­gard to the de­vel­op­men­tal path the coun­try had tak­en, the le­gal land­scape in­volved a "heavy and oner­ous re­spon­si­bil­i­ty."

He added: "The Prime Min­is­ter cre­at­ed three min­istries out of what was pre­vi­ous­ly one, that is the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al's Of­fice, the Le­gal Af­fairs Min­istry and the Jus­tice Min­istry. It ap­pears that in the in­ter­est of ef­fi­cien­cy, crim­i­nal le­gal af­fairs were as­signed to the Min­istry of Jus­tice and in such cir­cum­stances I see noth­ing wrong with the AG de­fend­ing and be­ing guid­ed by the ad­vice which would have been pro­vid­ed to Cab­i­net by the Jus­tice Min­istry at all times."