TWO police officers have received the court’s permission to challenge the recent police promotion exercise fiasco which saw some 900 officers being elevated to the rank of corporals.

Last week, 109 constables filed a similar lawsuit against the Promotions Advisory Board (PAB).

On Thursday, Justice Frank Seepersad granted leave to constables Avalon Philip and Melicia Joseph who have also asked for an order for the retroactive promotion of officers in accordance with a 2021 and a 2022 departmental order which were operative when they applied for promotion and were assessed before being interviewed in 2023 by the PAB.

Their complaint stems from the changing of criteria for promotion after they passed the promotion examinations and were assessed. As a result, the two are asking the court to quash a 2023 departmental order which changed the criteria for promotion to the rank of corporal and direct the commissioner to publish a merit list consistent with the two previous departmental orders.

The matter will come up for hearing on January 29.

According to the lawsuit, the merit list was created contrary to how they legitimately expected it to be created because of the changed terms of the 2023 departmental order.

They said they did not expect certain new criteria to apply to them and several others in the promotion process since they all had met the previous criteria set out in the earlier departmental order.

“With these paragraphs now applying, I lost four points having qualified for promotion two years prior and I lost 1.5 points having had 15 years’ service at the time of assessment. Additionally, other competing candidates to whom these paragraphs were not to be applied would have benefited from additional points awarded to them given their years of service and the time they qualified for promotion,” one of the officers explained in the lawsuit.

“I was one of the officers awaiting the upcoming assessment to the rank of corporal, so DO 36 of 2022 directly applied to me and I relied on the fact that paragraphs 4(i) (1) and (2) of DO 93 of 2021 would not apply to my assessment, as well as others, for promotion to corporal.”

The new departmental order applied a demerit point system where points awarded for performance appraisals would be deducted in several categories, to include the qualifying years in which an officer successfully passed the exams, the officers’ years of service, and officers’ fitness.

The subsequent departmental orders are also the subject of pending lawsuits before the courts and have not yet been determined.

In the latest lawsuit, the two officers accused Police Commissioner Erla Harewood-Christopher of hiding the “purported change in the promotion process and only cause it to be published after interviews were completed.”

This, they said was “deeply deeply unfair.”

“I am not aware of any change of circumstance which can justify the change of criterion after the interview process was already completed.

“I am not aware of any other departmental order being held back from