Government yesterday expressed its unhappiness with the ruling of Acting Chief Justice Ian Chang which saw its challenge of the numerical make-up of the National Assembly’s Committee of Selection being thrown out and said it will be studying the implications of the ruling.
“Certainly it is a decision we are unhappy about and it has implications for the way in which we would be functioning and the way in which the Tenth Parliament would function and that is a matter under study,” Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon told reporters yesterday when asked about the ruling.
Justice Chang ruled that the court had no jurisdiction in the matter since there was no evidence of a constitutional breach.
Luncheon said the government has not had time to examine the implications of the ruling and what will be the way forward.
Justice Chang, who also found that the constitution does not mandate that the Committee of Selection and other parliamentary standing committees must reflect the proportionality of seats held by the parties in the National Assembly, concluded that the Attorney General Anil Nandlall’s constitutional motion had been “legally misconceived”.
Nandlall had filed the motion in February to challenge the numerical make-up of the Committee of Selection and to settle the composition of others, saying that they ought to be reflective of the votes won by the parties at the last general elections. He proposed that five seats on the committees go to the PPP/C, with four to APNU and one to the AFC, as opposed to the current make-up, which sees APNU and AFC with four seats and one seat, respectively, while the PPP/C has four seats.
Opposition Leader David Granger and Speaker of the National Assembly Raphael Trotman were named as the respondents in the case.
