TRINIDAD AND Tobago seems to be in the grip of an embarrassing phase of the “politics of hindsight”.
It follows last month’s rushed repeal by parliament of the controversial section 34 of the Administration of Justice (Indictable Proceedings) Act 2011 which was unanimously approved by both the House of Representatives and Senate late last year.
Now, not just elected government and opposition parliamentarians, as well as senators, who are revealing repentance over claimed failure to be sufficiently alert about the potential misuse of section 34 to the benefit of those facing criminal charges; so also is the current Acting President Timothy Hamel-Smith.
Hindsight has often been summoned to the rescue of more than quite a few, in all professions, not the least by those in politics, when embarrassment shows up in public and cannot be avoided.
In the current example of Trinidad and Tobago, which on August 31 celebrated 50 years of independence from Britain, Hamel-Smith, a former politician, current attorney at law and President of the Senate, presided at the session that unanimously approved the law.
This past weekend, amid much political mudslinging between the administration of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and the parliamentary opposition People’s National Movement (PNM) of Keith Rowley, Hamel-Smith declared in a statement that, “with hindsight”, not only was the approved law “fundamentally flawed”, it was “wrong” for such legislation to have been passed in the first place.
Score one for Hamel-Smith in summoning “hindsight” to ease his own agony over presiding at the Senate’s passage of that legislation, at the core of which is to expedite resolution of a mountainous backlog of thousands of criminal cases waiting, ten years and more, to be addressed by the courts.
But what about Leader of the Opposition Keith Rowley? He is now busily engaged in confrontational politics with the government over the repeal of Section 34 when all PNM parliamentarians (except former Prime Minister Patrick Manning, who was absent), voted for the legislation. Subsequently, so also did all of the senators.
The Prime Minister, a former Attorney General, was to break her silence, amid opposition uproar for “action”, by firing the Minister of Justice Herbert Volney, with the explanation in a statement that he had misled cabinet with a claim of having received a positive signal from Chief Justice Ivor Archie to go ahead with arrangements for the legislation.
The Chief Justice was to claim misrepresentation and Volney was to deem his dismissal unfair as he tagged himself the “sacrificial lamb”.
Such then, are some of the painful developments in what’s currently being expediently played out in Trinidad and Tobago as the politics of “hindsight”.
