SCARBROUGH, Tobago, CMC—Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley Friday said the government has no problem with a legal challenge to the state of emergency (SoE) that was imposed in Trinidad and Tobago earlier this week, maintaining that the measure is aimed at dealing with a minority of the population engaged in criminal activities.
“We have been impacted in the last few months by the wilds and misbehavior of a small minority. People… we call criminals and call themselves by various other names, but the bottom line is that the actions of such persons…pose risks to all of us in Trinidad and Tobago.
“I speak here specifically of their escalating criminal conduct, violent crime, expressed in frequent murders in Trinidad and Tobago largely operated by persons who operate as groups, gangs under a kind of leadership and from…all over the country and in some cases where they are bold enough to seize territory and to exclude law enforcement from those arrangements'”.
Rowley insisted that a “small number of people” are engaged in the “most anti-social of human actions, killing other human beings or taking actions against other human beings that could result in killings, and they do not care.”
Rowley said when the SoE is “targetting that half a percent or less than half a percent of the population who have chosen to go down that road for benefit, or profit or revenge.”
He said that what the country was dealing with on Friday night, when criminal gangs were engaged in killings in front of a police station in the capital, was that the authorities had also received “information of retaliatory actions” that would “more than likely occur in the days to follow.
“The government decisively, and that matter is now in the hands of the police officers and all the security agencies on the state’s payroll. We don’t look to the doctors, the nurses, or the priests to do that.
“And I want to point out that as they do this job, they put their lives on the line, and for the uncaring ones that do not have a caring word to say about them…just think about them, their families when they go out there to confront those killers.
“Just think of them when you make your statements, some of which are pretty ridiculous. They put their lives on the line standing on the bridge between you and those who have decided by their intellect, by their selfishness to disregard the law, and of course, we are not surprised that some will seek to create loopholes in the law because we saw it during COVID.
‘We went to court 65 times to protect the doctors and nurses because they were being sued left, right, and center, and the government had to go all the way to the Privy Council (and) it took a Privy Council ruling that the government was right to act in a particular way because we had people in our society who believe that everything the government does is wrong, or everything the government does is stupid. But that’s par for the course,” Rowley told reporters.
Blogger and social activist Vishal Persad, in a pre-action protocol letter issued by his lawyers on January 1 to President Christine Kangaloo and the Office of the Attorney General, called on the authorities to make certain changes to the Emergency Powers Regulations, 2024 or face High Court action.
He claims that parts of the Regulations are unconstitutional because they give police officers and members of the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force the power to arrest citizens and have them remain in custody for extended periods for trivial reasons.
Persad also claims that some citizens’ fundamental constitutional rights can be trampled upon based on the Regulations as they currently stand.
Rowley told reporters that while it would be impossible for the estimated 8,000-strong Trinidad and Tobago Police Service (TTPS) to monitor every aspect of a 1.3 million population effectively, it was also incumbent on the officers themselves to name rogue officers that destroy the trust built with the population and also putting their own lives at risk.
He said the TTPS must also do all it can to minimize criminals posing as police officers and carrying out criminal acts.
Rowley also announced that Parliament would meet on Monday to debate an extension of the SoE, adding, “We have to convince the Parliament to get an extension of the SoE” for the next three months and no more than six months going forward.
He insisted that ‘desperate circumstances forced us to take this action,’ adding that the government “will not hesitate in doing this knowing that it will not last forever.”
Meanwhile, the acting Chief Justice, Nolan Bereaux, has appointed three senior attorneys to the SoE tribunal. Deborah Peake, SC, was appointed chairman of the tribunal, which also includes Ian Benjamin, SC, and Lee Merry, SC.
Rowley, who is in Tobago for the Christmas Season, told a news conference that while the SoE had been instituted, his administration had also taken steps to ensure the economy was not severely affected.
“We have done all along by not going down that road. We were always concerned about the negative side of the state of emergency, and when, on this occasion, we decided we had to use the SoE, we also sought then to protect the public interest by not putting the public under any curfew because we do not believe that the curfew adds much more.”
He said the absolute authority is to give the police the authority to act quickly and do certain things; otherwise, they could not have done it in the time frame they wanted.
“We did not interfere with law-abiding people’s rights to assemble and to conduct your normal business,” he said, adding that ‘that is how this state of emergency is different from others.
“But we anticipate that by reasonable action we will get a reasonable result, and we understand that there will be disappointments in some quarters, disagreements in other quarters, and (those who would say) I told you so…and it should have been done before”.
Rowley said that a SoE, especially one with a curfew, would typically affect small and medium-sized businesses, noting that big businesses would invariably be able to deal with the curfew, especially from 8.00 am to 4.00 pm. (local time).
But he said this is not the case for small and medium-sized businesses, where the operators “exist in the twilight zone between 4.00 pm and 11.00 pm, and so a curfew literally shuts them down, and the government has been mindful of that all along.”
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