A landmark constitutional ruling handed down by the High Court of Trinidad and Tobago on Friday has confirmed that the state unlawfully violated the fundamental constitutional rights of a 76-year-old citizen, who was stranded abroad by Covid-19 border closures and denied an opportunity to exchange $10,000 in old cotton-paper $100 banknotes for the new polymer currency after a 2019 demonetization program.
The claim was originally brought by Shantee Nanan, who passed away in November 2024 while the case was still pending. Following her death, the court appointed her son Edison Nanan to step in and represent her estate through the conclusion of proceedings. Justice Devindra Rampersad, who delivered the final judgment, found that the former People’s National Movement (PNM) administration’s administration of the late currency redemption regime outlined in the Central Bank Act fell short of constitutional requirements, breaching Nanan’s rights to due process and equal protection under the law.
The root of the dispute stretches back to the 2019 demonetization of the old $100 cotton banknotes. Nanan did not challenge the legality of the demonetization program itself or the enabling legislation that put it into place. Instead, her grievance centered on the state’s refusal to fairly apply the statutory relief mechanism created to assist citizens who could not meet the redemption deadline for legitimate, unforeseen reasons.
In 2019, Nanan traveled abroad to care for her husband, who was suffering from a serious illness, before she herself became unwell shortly after her arrival. When the government of Trinidad and Tobago abruptly closed its national borders in March 2020 to slow the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, Nanan was barred from reentering the country until January 2021—months after the statutory deadline for exchanging old banknotes had passed. Upon her return home, she found $10,000 in demonetized notes stored among her personal belongings, which the state refused to exchange when she applied for an extension.
Court proceedings revealed critical context about how the redemption relief power was being administered by the Ministry of Finance. Between 2019 and January 2024, 94 separate applications for extensions of time to redeem old notes were submitted under Section 27A(5) of the Central Bank Act—and not a single one was approved. Justice Rampersad found that this consistent track record proved the existence of a settled, unwritten policy of blanket refusal, even though Parliament had explicitly granted the executive discretion to approve relief for qualifying, deserving cases.
The state mounted a robust defense of its policy, arguing that the claim was legally flawed from its inception. State attorneys contended that because Nanan had accepted the constitutionality of the demonetization program itself and did not bring a challenge to the proportionality of the legislation, there was no unlawful policy open to judicial review. They further argued that the case involved only the application of enacted law, not an independent unlawful policy that could be overturned by the courts.
Citing evidence from former minister Stuart Young, the state also emphasized that the demonetization initiative was implemented to disrupt illegal cash transactions and combat organized crime, noting that roughly $500 million in old banknotes remained unredeemed and unaccounted for. Allowing any portion of this currency back into circulation, the defense argued, would fundamentally undermine the core national security and anti-crime objectives of the program, and asking the court to order redemption would improperly force the judiciary to overstep into executive policy-making.
Justice Rampersad rejected all of the state’s arguments outright, dismissing them as a “procedural dead end.” In his ruling, he emphasized that a statutory power created specifically to relieve hardship cannot lawfully be exercised as a blanket, unchanging refusal behind secret, unpublicized criteria that are never disclosed to the public.
“A statutory power to relieve deserving cases, operated as a settled and invariable refusal behind criteria that were never formulated, much less published, is not the exercise of a discretion at all,” the judge wrote in his judgment. “It is precisely the species of arbitrariness which takes a complaint out of the ordinary run of administrative law and into the realm of the Constitution.”
The justice found that by operating the relief scheme in what he termed a “procedural vacuum,” the executive unlawfully restricted the discretion that Parliament had intentionally created to protect citizens from harsh or unforeseen consequences of new legislation. This arbitrary action, the court ruled, directly violated Nanan’s constitutional rights to property ownership and protection under the law.
“It is one thing for the State to decline to relieve a person who simply allowed the period to elapse,” Justice Rampersad explained. “It is another thing entirely to deprive a person who had good reason of any means of having that reason considered, by operating the relieving discretion as a blanket refusal behind criteria that were never formulated much less published or disclosed.”
While the judge acknowledged that the state has a legitimate, critical interest in combating financial crime and protecting national security, he held that these goals cannot serve as a blanket justification for abandoning core principles of procedural fairness.
As a remedy for the constitutional violation, the High Court ordered the state to pay Nanan’s estate $10,000 in compensatory damages equal to the face value of the unredeemed notes, plus 2.5% annual interest running from March 18, 2022—the date the original claim was filed—through the date of the final judgment. The court also awarded an additional $30,000 in vindicatory damages, a penalty designed to acknowledge the severity of the constitutional breach and deter the executive from continuing to use secret, arbitrary policy practices in the future. The state was further ordered to cover all of the claimant’s legal costs, which will be assessed by the Registrar of the High Court if the two parties cannot reach a mutual agreement on the amount.
