Jul 23 - Picardo Does Not Want Independent Adjudication – Say GSD
The GSD have issued the following statement:
The GSD Opposition notes the motion which the Chief Minister proposes to move at the September meeting of Parliament.
Leaving aside the Chief Minister’s childish comments that the Leader of the Opposition does not have the courage to face him in a debate in Parliament, or the hysteria and anger that oozes from his latest statement (both of which are not befitting of the office of a Chief Minister), the problem the Chief Minister has is that he does not want independent adjudication of the issue by the Speaker. He knows that any independent adjudication would create a huge problem for him, because if the conclusion is that he intentionally misled Parliament, he would be forced to resign. He prefers to hide behind a Government majority in Parliament to continue to mislead the people of Gibraltar. That is the context in which people should judge this motion.
Daniel Feetham said: “I have always accepted that bringing a motion was one of the options open on a complaint that a Minister has misled Parliament, but it is our view that in a mature democracy, it cannot be the only option. We have made those views clear to the Speaker and we will wait for due process to run its course”.
“In a debate on such a motion, the Government of Gibraltar will always be a judge in its own cause because we have no backbenchers that can threaten a Government majority in our Parliament. Worse still, an Opposition Member could himself be liable to face a motion based on vexatious allegations from a Government which he could not have the Speaker investigate or rule upon! Such a state of affairs would bring our Parliament and our democratic process into disrepute. Everywhere in the democratic world, complaints of this nature can be adjudicated independently.”
“These things are usually best tested by extreme examples. People should consider a situation where a Member clearly misleads Parliament and everyone in the Chamber can see that he is lying. The lie is pointed out to him and he persists. To suggest that only a motion can be brought by another Member and that the Speaker cannot make a ruling that the Member in question has misled the House cannot (or should not) be right, particularly since we do not have any other body independent of the Executive which can investigate complaints. This also goes to the heart of good governance. If Mr. Picardo is so confident of his position, he should agree for the speaker to rule upon whether he has or has not misled the House.”
Finally, we will deal with the issue of the use of savers’ money from the Gibraltar Savings Bank to fund Government projects separately.
