A coroner’s inquest into the death of billionaire businessman JP McManus’s daughter-in-law Emma McManus is to go ahead in Barbados, local media have reported.
The year 2022 was one of landmark judicial cases.
It started with the constitutional challenge to the snap general election called by Prime Minister Mia Mottley, two years before it was constitutionally due. The action brought by attorney-at-law Lalu Hanuman on behalf of Philip Catlyn, challenged Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s decision to call the election while the COVID-19 pandemic was raging.
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Hundreds of primary and secondary school teachers are being denied a second term’s leave because of the failure of a High Court judge to deliver a written decision.That has been revealed by the president of the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) Rudy Lovell who said that 15 months after Madame Justice Shona Griffith overturned the decision by the Ministry of Education, Technological and Vocational Training (METVT) to stop allowing a second term’s leave, teachers are still waiting to benefit from the ruling.And he said the affected educators were frustrated.“Teachers continue to suffer burnout and even though there is a legal mechanism drafted to allow them to re-energise after the first 15 years and subsequently after every five years of service, that right has been taken away from those who wish to exercise it,” he said.
The spokesman for the business community has called on law enforcement authorities to go after importers of illegal guns, regardless of who and where in society they are, as she expressed the group’s concern about the recent gunplay in the country.President of the Barbados Private Sector Association (BPSA) Trisha Tannis has also urged Government to make amendments to the Bail Act to prevent people on murder charges from easily posting bail.Sharing business’ concern about a spike in gun-related crime that included five killings last week, Tannis said the time had come to hold accountable all those responsible for bringing illegal firearms into the island.“As a country, they have told us that we have invested in scanners at ports of entry. It is difficult to think that in an island of 166 square miles that we [don’t] have intelligence that tells us where the issues are, and to our minds the only issue we have is one of accountability.
Government has signalled its intention to appeal recent decisions in which accused men were awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation after the courts found their constitutional rights were infringed.This was made clear on Friday by Attorney General Dale Marshall who said the State will challenge the rulings of Justices Cecil McCarthy and Cicely Chase who awarded Pedro Ellis and Larry Patrick Agard a combined $155 000.Justice Chase awarded Agard $95 000 for the 14-year delay in having his matter heard, while Justice McCarthy awarded murder accused Agard $60 000 after he ruled that his constitutional rights to a fair hearing within a reasonable time and to bail had been breached.Ellis had also been awarded $75 000 by Justice Shona Griffith for being unlawfully detained for 18 days after he was acquitted of murder.“In each of those cases, the issue was the delay that besets the criminal system and how it has infringed individual’s constitutional rights and in each of t