Sascha Wil­son

The Law As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (LATT) has ex­pressed con­cern over per­son­al at­tacks against Court of Ap­peal judges, fol­low­ing their rul­ing in the Hadeed case. It says while ro­bust pub­lic de­bate of ju­di­cial de­ci­sions is le­git­i­mate in a democ­ra­cy, crit­i­cism must re­main re­spect­ful and not de­scend in­to un­found­ed al­le­ga­tions that im­pugn the in­tegri­ty or in­de­pen­dence of the Ju­di­cia­ry.

In a state­ment yes­ter­day, LATT ex­plained that the Court of Ap­peal’s rul­ing dealt with an in­ter­locu­to­ry ap­pli­ca­tion and did not nec­es­sar­i­ly de­ter­mine the ul­ti­mate le­gal­i­ty of the de­ten­tion or con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the Emer­gency Pow­ers regime. Those sub­stan­tive ques­tions, LATT said, re­main be­fore the courts.