A High Court judge Wednesday dismissed a complaint by three supporters of the main opposition United Workers Party (UWP) following the 2014 general elections.
Mervin Jno Baptiste, Antoine Defoe, and Edincot St. Valle, had filed criminal complaints against 13 candidates of the ruling Dominica Labour Party (DLP), including Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, National Security Minister Rayburn Blackmoore and Colin McIntyre, the Minister for Planning, Economic Development and Investment, for “treating” in the run-up to the election.
The DLP won the elections by a 15-6 margin.
In their complaints filed six months after the general election, the UWP supporters argued that the 13 successful DLP candidate engaged in treating by providing a free concert to the Dominican electorate with international gospel star Donnie McClurkin on 28 November 2014.
They also alleged that the elected members provided another free concert headlined by Jamaican artiste Morgan Heritage on December 6, 2014.
But attorney Lennox Lawrence had argued that the complaints, which had been signed by Magistrate Bernard Pacquette in May 2015, had been filed “well after the 21 days stipulated by the House of Assembly Elections Act.
“So on 10 July, 2015 we filed an application for leave to apply for judicial review myself, being led by Senior Counsel Anthony Astaphan, challenging the legality of the complaints,” Lawrence told the online publication, Vibes News.
“We had gotten a stay of execution at the High Court and the learned judge took time to consider the application. So the learned trial judge considered the matter and gave her decision today. In our view the decision is extremely well reasoned,” Lawrence said.
Astaphan said he was pleased with the ruling terming the complaints as “a political stunt” adding that they were in “complete violation of the law and the constitutional provisions which vested exclusive jurisdiction in the High Court to determine issues of election offences by elected members of parliament which had the effect of having them removed from office and liable and subject to prosecution.
“So once again the United Workers Party has lost another case in the court. Let us see what sort of wailing and weeping they do now,” Astaphan added.
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