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My person of the year is Justice William Ramlal

Jan 03, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

 

 

I don’t know Justice William Ramlal. I have only said ‘hello’ to him about three times when I saw him on the corridor of the High Court. Justice Ramlal gave judgement against me twice that I did not agree with, but I never wrote about it. I respected his right to see the law differently from my lawyers.
The first was when as the lead judge in a Full Court decision, he upheld the injunction that then President Bharrat Jagdeo secured through the Chief Justice, preventing my column from making any reference or repeating the term, “ideological racism.”
I felt that my lawyer, Khemraj Ramjattan, had argued a good case of “publication in the nation’s interest.”
The second time was when he awarded Juan Edghill cost when my legal team did not file their affidavit in time. Edghill sued me for contempt of court and for the seven times the matter was called in front of Justice Ramlal, Edghill himself was not present.
On those seven occasions, Justice Ramlal did not request his attendance which I think out of respect for the court, he should have ordered. I was annoyed at the fact that I had to pay the cost out of my pocket.
Those two occasions were my only encounters with Justice Ramlal. Outside of that I know nothing about his career or life. But at the end of 2013, he made a decision on the bench that should earn him the admiration of every Guyanese who cares about justice and the rule of law. It was a brave judgement for which he should be commended and which should serve as a guiding post for all judges in the future.
Justice Ramlal awarded $2M in damages to a lawyer (at the time), Navindra Singh, for wrongful arrest and detention. I disagree with the small amount for two reasons. One is that it is a mere US$10,000. Wrongful arrest should carry much more damages. Secondly, the sum should have been more than $6 million to deter power drunk police personnel from behaving as if we live in Chato’s Land.
There are good, professional police officials in this country. The Commissioner of Police is a far more professional person than Mr. Henry Greene whom he succeeded. But the police force is replete with bad eggs who have no respect for proper conduct and even the very laws under which they seek to arrest citizens.
I could write books in my experience as a human rights activist on police misconduct in arresting and detaining innocent citizens, many of them too poor to sue the police. And even when they do and win, their legal fees would cost more than what the judges will award. This is what makes Justice Ramlal’s judgement so important
I refer to a mere $100,000 that the Chief Justice gave to a bus owner that Mark Benschop and I hired to transport school children to protest a police killing in Patentia. The driver was slapped with three charges and put on bail, yet Commissioner Henry Greene impounded his livelihood – his minibus. Then Opposition Leader, Robert Corbin, sued the police, and a mere $100,000 was awarded by the Chief Justice.
Mark Benschop passed up an opportunity for suing the police for over $20M when he was allegedly assaulted and had his vehicle badly damaged by a person who now sits in the PPP central committee, yet it was Benschop who was arrested, charged and detained. In front of a senior police officer, the accused who assaulted Benschop threatened my life.
Mark Benschop and I should have sued the police for $50M when they detained us at Brickdam for three days and three nights for two minor traffic offences.
This is the kind of naked power many police officers display in this country, and judges are too lenient. I did a column rejecting the High Court’s compensation of six million to an underage boy who was tortured by the police and had his reproductive parts burned. This was shocking cruelty for which the policemen should have been jailed and the boy assigned at least twenty million dollars. It was a heinous and dastardly act.
Is Justice Ramlal’s no-nonsense decision the beginning of attempts to rein in some reckless, recalcitrant and dangerous police officers? This columnist will say most boldly, our policemen and policewomen are terribly paid, and they should not endanger their lives for such paltry sums. But the hard-working police in Guyana are stained by those who in the name of the law commit terrible wrongs against the poor and powerless in Guyana.

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