Dear Editor,
A hundred and forty years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, who would later become the best-known American judge of all time, famously wrote “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience”.
This may explain why Basil Butcher Jr, writing in the Stabroek News on 6 March 2021, feels that it was illogical for me to decline to perform the role of returning officer at the recently scheduled Guyana Cricket Board elections.
But I would not have believed that the basic principles of administrative law, grounded as they are in common-sense, fairness and justice, were so arcane as to be illogical.
Because I presume that Mr Butcher took all logical steps necessary to inform himself of what happened before writing his letter, I am sure that he knew that, at the beginning of the workday on the day set for elections, I informed the Minister and representatives of the three county cricket boards that I had received correspondence late in the evening before, which I shared with them, from the Attorney for the Essequibo Cricket Board questioning the performance of my statutory function as Cricket Ombudsman in verifying registers.
He would also have known that I informed the representatives of the county boards in my email that I had recommended to the Minister that the elections be postponed to a later date because ignoring the contentions raised with me might have the effect of compounding the problems and disputes in cricket administration.
As Mr Butcher surely knew before writing his letter, I also suggested in my email that a postponement of the elections might allow for outstanding issues to be resolved to the satisfaction of all contending parties and might lead to elections which were free from discord and I expressed my belief that trying to address and resolve the outstanding issues would lessen the likelihood of further litigation of the nature that has plagued cricket administration over the last several years.
In proposing the postponement of the Guyana Cricket Board elections two of the foundational legal principles of administrative law were at the forefront of my mind. Those principles were described by Lord Diplock, the most accomplished English judge of the latter half of the twentieth century, in 1985, as illegality and procedural impropriety.
The first principle that concerned me was illegality, about which Lord Diplock said “the decision maker must understand correctly the law that regulates his decision-making and must give effect to it”.
I was conscious that one of the statutory functions of the Cricket Ombudsman is to be responsible for the verification of the register of clubs. But, having regard to the fact that the elections for the Demerara and Berbice boards were already conducted by Court order and I had no power to set aside the results of those elections, and because no issues were raised about the Essequibo elections, I felt that not concentrating on the verification of registers before elections would be the most logical action on my part.
Once the issue was raised, however, I knew that I had to take every possible step to give effect to the words and intention of the Cricket Administration Act so far as I could make sense of it where it concerned the performance of my statutory duty to verify registers.
I knew that the failure to do so would likely lead to a challenge and then nullification of the results of the elections on the basis that all statutory prerequisites to the elections were not carried out.
The second legal principle that concerned me was procedural fairness, which Lord Diplock described as arising on the “failure on the part of the decision maker to observe the basic rules of natural justice or the failure to act with procedural fairness toward the person who will be affected by the decision”.
On the day of the election there was a complaint before me. To avoid the results of elections being nullified, it was my duty to hear and address that complaint fairly. Not doing so would mean that I had not heard the complainant nor treated with its complaint with fairness and objectivity and it was not possible for me to hear and determine the issue that morning before elections.
So, despite what Mr Butcher thinks about the logical basis of my decision not to act as returning officer at the Guyana Cricket Board elections, my experience told me that proceeding with elections would inevitably lead to a challenge of the results which would probably succeed.
The fact that elections would have been held with a quorum would not have helped me defend my decision in Court to proceed.
Yours faithfully,
Kamal Ramkarran
