Almost a month ago, the Belize Grassroots Youth Empowerment Association (BGYEA) managed to get a victory against the Government of Belize when Justice Courtney Abel discharged the injunction that the Acting Solicitor General brought against them. The Government warned that if they wanted, they could just keeping bring those injunctions back, and today, they did just that.
In this new injunction, the Acting Solicitor General wants a declaration that Government is the owner of the land, a declaration that BGYEA and its members don't have a right to be on the land, and a case of trespass directly against Nigel Petillo and Sam Patton.
As we've told you, the Government wants to keep some 20 acres of land in the Harmonyville community as road reserve. They've designated that it is a buffer zone, and should remain untouched, but BGYEA wants to develop it by planting corn there.
The case went back before Justice Abel today, and we asked their attorney about this new tactic from the government to keep the land away from BGYEA:
Audrey Matura-Shepherd, Attorney for BGYEA
"This is treated as a first hearing because its a fix date claim form. What that simply means is that we came for the court to determine how far we are, in the sense that, did we get served with the documents, have we acknowledge the service of the document? Have we entered a defense? so that the court would know how to proceed - to set deadlines and timeline. And so basically it's just like an administrative aspect where the judge found out how far we are in terms of responding to the claim against BGYEA and setting a new court date which has been set for the 28th July at 10a.m."
Nigel Petillo, President, BGYEA
"Personally, I feel confident about this; I believe that when all this is over and done with and we are given the full rightful possession of our land, then we will be able to plant as much corn as we want and whatever else after that. Again, I want to repeat to the Belizean public and our members especially is that the idea here is to build our roads and build our community. The government has said to us over and over, they don't intend to build infrastructure for us, roads for us, anything. And so we had come up with ideas to do for ourselves and that's what the situation is here. They are fighting us because we are thinking about doing for self."
The estimation is that this case will not go to court for full arguments until sometime in September.
Email
Print