THE RULING of Justice Hazel Harris has confirmed what we had believed from the outset that the decision by Justice LLoyd Ellis to bar note-taking at the Commissioner of Inquiry into the prison disturbances had no basis in law.Mr. Justice Ellis who is the sole commissioner at the inquiry had barred the taking of verbatim notes other than by attorneys and the media. Justice Harris in her judgement found that the Commissions of Inquiry Act gave the commissioner no authority to make such a ruling.
To quote the learned judge "the statute does not authorise the commissioner to discriminate. The exercise of his power is repugnant to the general law. It could never have been in the contemplation of Parliament to empower the commissioner to make rules which are unjust, impartial, unfair, unreasonable or uncertain".
We applaud the judgement and our only regret is that Justice Ellis had not seen it fit to reconsider the matter and reverse his earlier decision, which we had described as arbitrary in the extreme.
We congratulate the lobby group Jamaicans for Justice, who were the victims of the ruling, for having the will to test the matter in the courts.
