PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad –The Trinidad and Tobago government today said it was exploring the possibility of increasing the fines and penalties for people breaking a curfew imposed as part of a state of emergency to deal with a rising crime situation here.
Attorney General Anand Ramlogan, speaking at the daily news briefing, said some people were taking the eight hour curfew “for a joke” and he was now considering amending the curfew order to reflect harsher penalties and fines.
A number of people, including at least two homeless persons, have appeared in court on charges rlated to breaking the curfew.
But even as the authorities were announcing that 684 people had been detained since the Kamla Persad Bissessar government announced the state of emergency on August 21, a social activist group has written the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) complaining that “brute force” was being used by the security forces.
The Laventille Ad Hoc Committee for the Eradication of Crime (LAHCEC) said it wants the ICC to investigation what is going on in Trinidad and Tobago, particularly the “many detentions being carried out by the armed forces”.
LAHCEC co-ordinator, Lennox Smith told local radio that the state of emergency has interfered with the rights of citizens, while brute force is being used on innocent people.
“The state of emergency is time specific it must come to an end and what are fears are is that it will be worst for the society in going back to where it all started given all what you have done because you have created greater animosity between the police and the community and you have involved the army as well.
“We anticipate that it will be a very volatile situation at the end of the day,” he said, noting that the letter to the ICC chief prosecutor mentions the Prime Minister, Ramlogan and National Security Minister retired Brigadier John Sandy.
“You are using brute force in order to achieve an objective that is self defeating simply because it is not sustainable. I thought what would have happened is that you would have used the opportunity to implement certain measures, social and economic, in a mass way to ensure that the root cause of the young ones gravitating to criminal activity…is eliminated as much as possible.”
Smith said he did not believe the idea of the state of emergency was to arrest or detain young people, build larger jails and” beat your chest and say you have achieved.
“This this thing could …in fact be described as the creation of a Frankenstein, meaning that …at the end of it you create a monstrosity,” he said. (CMC)
