THE EDITOR: The forensic tests of what is "appropriate, reasonable, proportionate" apply to ordinary laws subject to a constitution, including powers of a state of emergency or under public health measures. These tests however cannot by themselves determine a constitution, and in fact if they could do so any one-seat majority would remake a constitution.

Incidentally, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi speaks in these terms quite wrongly and quite often. To say therefore that mandatory vaccination could be appropriately constitutional on the basis of some perceived reasonable need and proportioned implementation is not how the issue is formulated, let alone determined.

This would be the case in all jurisdictions with a written constitution, unless the particular constitution expressly said otherwise.

The state of emergency and invocation of public health orders do not subjugate all the constitutions under the said tests. Moreover, the true position is reflected and further buttressed in the received existing law which is by and large incorporated into most if not all Commonwealth constitutions.

Recently, an OECS study trying to promote the wrong tests in the Caribbean was leaked and the jurists involved were left unnamed - and neither is this a way in which new things come into a constitution.

E GALY

via e-mail

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