KINGSTON, Jamaica – Leader of Government Business AJ Nicholson has asked President of the Senate, Floyd Morris, to remove the suspension order imposed on Opposition Senator Marlene Malahoo Forte, so she can attend tomorrow’s sitting of the Senate.

Senator Malahoo Forte was last Friday suspended after the Senate approved a motion debarring her for at least six days. She was suspended for failing to provide Morris with a copy of a 2010 letter from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, offering to sit as an itinerant court in Jamaica if accommodated by the Government.

Since her suspension, there have been calls from the Opposition for the Government to apologise to Malahoo Forte. However, the Senate president has refused to apologise.

In a letter to the Senate president, a copy of which was released to the media Wednesday, Nicholson said the demand for an apology and the Opposition’s threat to boycott the current debate on the Bills on Jamaica’s final appellate court have been undermined.

“The camera recordings at Gordon House for last Friday, October 23, have shown that Senator Malahoo Forte did not enter any of the ladies rooms. Perhaps, indeed, it may not even have been necessary to resort to an examination of the footage, for, in a dramatic change from what she and others maintained at the weekend… at no time did she enter the ladies room,” Nicholson said in the letter.

The leader of Government business said: “You would certainly agree that this blatant misrepresentation about suspension while being ‘on a bathroom break’, and attempt to have her taken ‘from the ladies room and brought to the floor of the Senate’, as stated by Dr Chang, and sending ‘a male marshal to retrieve her from (the ladies room)’, according to an open letter to the prime minister, serves to undermine the demand for an apology to the Senator, and the threat to boycott the Debate.”

He also told Morris that Justice Minister Senator Mark Golding has received a copy of the letter that had been demanded of Malahoo Forte from the Privy Council in London.

“The minister has released that letter to the media and will make it available to the members of the Senate,” Nicholson told Morris.

He said, therefore, that since everything concerning Senator Forte’s movements has been cleared up, “there appears to be no impediment to a resumption of the conduct of the people’s business in the Upper House”.

He insisted that there appears to be no reason why it should not be agreed on all sides that the pursuit of the conduct of the people’s business would justify the removal of the suspension order to coincide with the sitting of the Senate tomorrow.

The Government has 13 members in the Senate and the Opposition eight.