INDEPENDENT Senators Anthony Vieira and Amrita Deonarine said it is clear that Opposition Senator Anil Roberts is in contempt of Parliament.
They also said arguments advanced by Opposition Senator Wade Mark in defence of Roberts' actions and non-appearance before the Privileges Committee were flawed.
Vieira and Deonarine, who is a member of the committee, presented their respective cases during debate on a motion in the Senate to approve the committee's report.
The main recommendation of the report was that Roberts should personally and unreservedly apologise to Senate President Christine Kangaloo and the entire Senate at his next physical appearance before them.
Vieira said Mark's protestations about a premeditated plan by Government to put Roberts out of Parliament had no merit. He said the same applied to Mark's claims that the sanction against Roberts were harsh.
Vieira said Roberts was not being suspended, censured or expelled from Parliament.
"It could have been a lot worse. He is receiving the softest of all the available options," he said, advising Roberts to take the olive branch being extended to him.
Vieira said,"This is about Senator Roberts bussin' a mamaguy on the President of the Senate, in retaliation of rebuke."
Roberts, he said, "wanted to cast shade on the President of the Senate because he didn't like how she was moving.
"But you can't do that. When you are part of an institution, with rules you have sworn to uphold, you are bound by those rules. It can't be ignored and you just can't cast shade on the president for doing her job."
Regardless of whether senators agree with Kangaloo's ruling or not, Vieira said, "This is not the place for schoolboy heckling. The Senate is not a marketplace."
As an experienced parliamentarian and someone from a family of well known attorneys, Vieira said Roberts and his attorney (identified in the committee's report as Kiel Taklalsingh) would know that in appearing before the committee, the attorney's role "is limited to that of an adviser, not as a representative, not as advocate."
He said under the doctrine of the separation of powers, "the Parliament's absolute privilege, attaches to those matters, which are subject to Parliament's sole jurisdiction for exclusive cognisance."
Vieira queried Roberts' excuse of illness as a reason why he could not appear before the committee, since, he said, Roberts appeared physically in the Senate and virtually at joint select committee meetings while the Privileges Committee was deliberating on the complaint against him.
Vieira hoped Roberts would not suffer the fate of Roman orator Cicero, who was killed and beheaded on the instructions of Mark Antony, Antony's wife Fulvia cutting out Cicero's tongue and stabbing it with a hairpin.
Deonarine said Roberts failed to provide any medical document to show why he could not appear before the committee.
"Even if you are in primary school that is so."
She agreed with earlier statements by Leader of Government Business Clarence Rambharat that the com
