By Omar Bah
The Global Home of Medical Mission country representative has vowed to sue President Adama Barrow if he steps foot on the company’s Bijilo disputed land to lay the foundation for a hotel.
The government and Global HOMM have been battling over ownership of the land which was taken from the organisation by former president Yahya Jammeh.
The organisation left the country but returned after Jammeh lost his 2016 re-election bid and sued the government in an attempt to regain ownership of the land. In 2020, the high court ruled that the land be given back to Global HOMM. The government wants to use the land to construct a hotel as part of infrastructural development for OIC Conference.
Last year, the OIC secretariat together with its purported investor, contractors, and engineers visited the said property for inspection and the president is expected to lay the foundation stone next month.
But Nenneh Freda Gomez said she still believes that is just a plan.
“Even though they have made statements that in July the president is going to come to lay the foundation stone. I don’t know what authority the president has to come and perform such an action. But let’s watch and see the president who is supposed to protect all of us, who is supposed to be promoting the rule of law, who is supposed to be making sure the right thing is done, who is supposed to be making sure our judiciary is functional, who is supposed to be making sure nobody compromises the sanctity of our judiciary.
Let’s see if he himself will be in contempt. Because if the president comes here, I am not inviting him. It’s not going to be on our invitation and he also will be trespassing on this land and he will be sued, he will be charged with contempt. We will make sure we go to court to file contempt proceedings against him because nobody is above the law,” she said.
Madam Gomez described as false Justice Minister Dawda Jallow’s claims that there were two ongoing litigations concerning the land.
“I want to remind the AG that the state made an attempt by way of an application to strike out the suit on the representation that the property was one of those acquired by Yahya Jammeh and therefore a subject of the Janneh Commission, which was in fact false. The said application was dismissed by the court,” she added.
She added that the state had accepted payment of land rent from the Mission in the sum of D589,500 covering the period of 2007 to 2020.
“It is unimaginable that as a lawyer, the Attorney General would state that the judgements/orders of the courts in favour of the Home of Medical Mission are unenforceable. It is a basic principle of law that all judgements and orders of courts are valid and subsist until set aside. Even the layperson knows this basic principle,” she added.
The state through the AG, Nenneh added, continues to take the law into their own hands and blatantly disobeying and disrespecting the orders of the courts by using state-owned security apparatus to trample on the rights of citizens.
“If left unchecked, their distasteful actions will surely compromise the sanctity of our courts and render the rule of law in this country futile,” she added.
