Image: Davida and Goliath. ASPIRE’s little woman knocks down the big AG – again.
At the end of February, the Attorney General (AG) in Antigua and Barbuda received the second dismissal of his effort to suppress a constitutional challenge to the country’s criminal abortion law. In a unanimous decision, the Court of Appeal rejected his request to overrule the decision of a High Court judge and remove her from the case. The Appeal Court has returned the case to the High Court.
The long journey to this point started in April 2022, when Advocates for Safe Parenthood: Improving Reproductive Equity (ASPIRE) wrote to the AG seeking a clarification of the abortion law and pointing out their concerns about its constitutionality. The AG is yet to grace them with a reply.
So, two years later, in April 2024, ASPIRE filed a constitutional challenge to the law with the High Court. The AG then committed his Chambers to a course of creating one delay after another. First, he asked for more time to prepare.
Then he invented a disingenuous claim and asked the High Court to strike the challenge on the weird grounds that the abortion law had been repealed in 1995. He did this even though in 2020 and 2022 he had spoken of the need to revise the abortion law to allow for more exceptions (Daily Observer).
How did he get there? In 1995 there was an exercise of rationalizing the Offences Against the Person Act (OAPA, a 19th century British law with two clauses that made all abortions illegal, which also covered former colonies) with the Sexual Offences Act (SOA). Sexual offences were removed from the OAPA and put into the SOA. Abortion is not a sexual offence. Those clauses were not touched. However, this exercise inevitably required a renumbering of the clauses. Hence the AG’s claim that the clause relating to abortion had been “repealed”.
The High Court not only rejected his claim, it also slapped him with the obligation to pay costs.
Displeased with that outcome, the AG went to the Court of Appeal claiming that the judge had erred in her ruling, asking for its dismissal to stand and for the judge to be removed from the case. The Court of Appeal rejected both requests.
Thus, the AG received his second defeat. He was down but not out.
He can now either accept the decision and allow ASPIRE to present the substance of its case, or he can appeal to the Privy Council. Going to the Privy Council would be a waste of time and resources. But ASPIRE would not be surprised.
His tactics of unscrupulous delays have left women at risk of unsafe abortions for a full year. “Justice delayed is justice denied.” His conduct is indecent, unnecessary and unworthy.
REPORT by Fred Nunes. 6 March 2025.
REFERENCES: — Attorney General’s statement in 2020: Daily Observer, 10 March, 2020. https://www.antiguaobserver.com/abortion-laws-to-come-under-cabinet-scrutiny/;
— Attorney General’s statement in 2022: Daily Observer, 16 May, 2022.
https://antiguaobserver.com/government-to-hold-consultations-on-legalising-abortion/;
CARTOON: by Paul Harris with Fred Nunes for ASPIRE.