So much has been happening news-wise in 2016, that you might have to strain your memory to recall the "Sarstoon S-I." It was put out back in April of this year when Government wanted to shut down the Sarstoon so that no one could go in there and threaten the fragile relations which prevailed at the time. The S-I said that no one could enter the Sarstoon for a month.
But, things still ended up going south with Guatemala, and the SI was cancelled before even a month had passed. But the PUP still challenged it in court, on the basis that it restricted citizens' constitutional right to freedom of movement - and that the government had no authority to enact such a law.
Well, six months later, the Supreme Court struck out the PUP challenge, saying that it's now an academic matter since the law was revoked. The PUP's legal advisor Andrew Marshalleck was circumspect about the outcome:...
Andrew Marshalleck, S.C., PUP Legal Advisor
"The claim has been struck, there'll be no consideration of it on the merits. Clearly the court didn't consider it important enough to determine and didn't think that it was very likely that it would reoccur so as to merit a reconsideration of the issue."
"Difficulty is that you're talking about twenty odd days and no real harm being caused to anybody so that in a sense in a very real way it was academic."
"Clearly the court didn't think that it ought to use judicial time to do this that it had the sufficient level of importance, and, ahm, I don't know that the court was not justified in so finding. What it is, is, as you are well aware, ahm, there are quite a - I think 30 - 40 decisions of the chief justice that had been reserved and had been awaiting judgments now in so many cases for years and when you take that into account, and we look at it from that perspective, it's very clear that there's really no need to throw in that mix another politically charged decision. You would have noticed that the chief justice did not in fact dismiss it, but he stayed it, so that if they did decide they want to bring it back, you can revive it."
Agassi Finnegan appeared for the Solicitor General's office.
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