By Robert Hart, Staff ReporterOPPOSITION SENATOR Anthony Johnson is accusing the Government of degrading one of Jamaica's official state publications to the point of near irrelevance.
Mr. Johnson, the leader of Opposition Business in the Senate, heatedly argued on Friday that the Jamaica Gazette had become far too inaccessible to the wider public.
"It serves no useful purpose (and it ought to) because our system of jurisprudence demands that the Jamaica Gazette be used as the final point at which all acts that become law are published," he complained while ignoring pleas from Government senators to calm down.
Senator Johnson was speaking during last week's sitting of the Senate at which the Bill establishing the Geographical Indications Law was passed, after the continuation of the debate started a week earlier. The Bill will be returned to the House of Representatives with several amendments, one of which deals with the requirement for a notice of the revocation of a trademark to be published in a daily newspaper as well as the Gazette.
The Gazette is the official Government publication of notices, proclamations, orders, rules, regulations and new legislation. It also publishes judicial practice directions and other information of which the Government through its various arms executive (Cabinet), legislative (Parliament) and judicial (the Courts) wishes to notify the general public, or some specified section of the public.
On Friday, the Opposition senators had called for the inclusion of the publication of the notice in a daily newspaper because it was not satisfied that the Gazette was easily available to the general population. In fact, Senator Johnson remarked that "There was one Minister who admitted to me that he had been a Minister of Government for 10 years (and) the first time he saw one (Gazette) was last year."
The inclusion of a requirement for publication in a daily newspaper has become somewhat standard practice in the regulations that accompany acts, but the Government was hesitant in accepting its inclusion in the Bill.
"If you insist on putting it in the newspaper, in the Act ... rather than in the regulations, you are more or less forcing us to say... well it's a newspaper where the thing is going to happen. You'll never bring back the Gazette," said Senator Burchell Whiteman, leader of Govern-ment Business, who apparently concurred that there was a need to increase access to the Government publication.
He was responding to Senator Johnson's argument that the inclusion in the Act was a manner of assisting the public until the Gazette was once again a 'serious document'.
