March 26 2019
Dear Editor,
SN’s editorial of March 25th, captioned `The Court of Appeal ruling and its aftermath’, was poorly informed and reasoned in key places. For brevity, I will dwell on just two of its flaws. First, it is flawed and groundless to conclude that the Appeal Court’s definition of an absolute majority (half + 1) now applies to every instance where formally-constituted bodies have to make decisions of high importance. Many in the blogosphere and now SN (with its example of a three-judge panel) have brushed up their high-school maths to show how the half +1 formula produces strange results if applied to other numbers.
That the Appeal Court ruled on a specific matter in a specific context in a specific document has been ignored by our Maths geniuses. SN and others evidently believe that an edict should now be issued to all organizations countrywide instructing that henceforth every important decision they make requires an absolute majority, regardless of what is written in their own rulebooks or constitutions. SN should know better not to engage in this thoughtlessness that the Appeal Court’s ruling on Article 106 (6) now somehow applies outside the text and context in which the ruling was made.
SN’s second flaw lurks in its statement “It remains the case that those who have argued for 34 as a majority have inserted the word ‘absolute’ into their pleadings where this term is not present in the article in question and is hardly implied in the rest of the constitution.” But both legal teams did agree that an absolute majority is required for the passage of the no-confidence motion. The debate centred on how to compute it. But even so, does SN not understand the legal concept of levels of entrenchment? Does SN not know that to sometimes understand the text of a legal provision, its context and intent matter; moreover, that a constitution must be interpreted in its entirety to discern its scheme?
Differences of opinion will forever remain on the no-confidence motion among reasonable people. But several of its issues are settled and straightforward among those who care to be objective and informed.
Yours faithfully,
Sherwood Lowe
Editor’s note: On several occasions since Friday, Anil Nandlall, counsel for the Opposition Leader has said he never agreed that an “absolute majority” was needed.
