Court throws out squatters’ appeal

Squatters’ hopes of occupying State lands at Toruba North in San Fernando were dashed yesterday, when the Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal brought by the squatters for judicial review (JR) against eviction by the National Housing Authority (NHA). The squatters were also ordered to pay costs fit for senior and junior counsel. The matter was first argued before Justice Nolan Bureaux in the High Court, but he had also ruled against the squatters on July 31, 2003. The Court of Appeal, comprising Justices Rolston Nelson (president), Wendell Kangaloo and Ivor Archie, said it found no basis on which an appellate court can review the trial judge’s discretion to refuse the substantive application for JR.

Attorneys Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj SC, Sunil Gopaul-Gosine and V Maharaj appeared for the squatters, while Russel Martineau SC and Deborah Peake represented the NHA. Nelson, who delivered the 35-page judgment, said Maharaj submitted that the existing common-law remedy of self-help had to be modified to conform to Sections 4 and 5 of the Constitution. “The inarticulate premise was that the remedy of self-help infringed the fundamental rights provision of the Constitution.” But section 6 (1) (a) of the Constitution provides that nothing in Sections 4 and 5 (the Fundamental Rights sections) shall invalidate “an existing law.” The definition of law in the Constitution includes “any unwritten rule of law.”

The judgment also added that Maharaj’s argument must have been conceived after the decision of the Privy Council in Roodal v the State (2004) and in Matthew v the State, in which the Law Lords, in a majority decision in the latter, rejected the same arguments raised by Maharaj in the current case. The judgment noted that, “Whenever persons are lawfully evicted, such eviction impacts on their lives. However, I am unable in the absence of authority to conclude that such eviction, or threat of it, occasion a breach of (i) the right to life (ii) the right to security of the person (iii) the right to enjoyment of property (iv) the protection of the law (in the sense of access to the courts) or (v) the right to respect for private and family life.”