Nevis Approves Resolution adopted by the National Assembly on Friday 17th April, 2020. This primarily extends the state of emergency to combat the threat of COVID-19 in the Federation of St. Christopher and Nevis.
The resolution which received safe passage at the emergency sitting of the Nevis Island Assembly yesterday Saturday 18 April, became effective yesterday mmm for a period of six months.
Premier of Nevis, Mark Brantley who brought the resolution, expressed that the move was necessary to provide the legal underpinning to implement the continuation of the state of emergency in Nevis.
He said:
We are doing all that we can to respond to an unprecedented threat. Something you or I nor anyone in this room has ever seen before, and the unprecedented nature of the threat means there is no play book. There is no encyclopaedia that we can take from the shelf and say When COVID come, this is the way you respond…
Every day we are tweaking. We are adjusting. We are trying to get it right and that’s because there is no manual. So we have to continually be agile, and again that is why we have the benefit of the state of emergency, to allow us the legal room to manoeuvre. So when we can tell people stay off the roads, stay in your homes, we have a legal underpinning for it, and we could not run the risk that that underpinning is secured on St. Christopher but on Nevis because of [Section] 19 [subsection] 4, the argument is made that it doesn’t any longer apply to Nevis and so that’s why we are here today
