In a video posted to opposition leader, Allen Chastanet Facebook page on Friday, March 18th, 2023.
He shared his party’s position on the Suppression of Escalated Crime (Police Powers) Bill.
“Tonight in the house we were debating a new bill that the government was looking to introduce which is a suppression bill to reinforce the powers or the authority of the police force in handling the current crisis that we’ve had. The opposition is absolutely in spirit, in support of any measures that can help abate the current crisis that St Lucia is facing and particularly the citizens in the south.
Our concern was the hastiness to pass this bill. This is a government that has a long tradition of rushing to put bills into the House and coming back to us to tell us that they can amend it later” he says.
“Now in this particular case, this new suppression bill is empowering police officers, ordinary police officers, to come into your home, to stop you in your car, to determine which roads the public can use and even to confine you to your own home. Now, these are basic civil liberties that we’re entrusting with the police and sadly that the only check in balance really would be ultimately the Minister responsible for National Security.
What we indicated is that the time the government could’ve genuinely reacted was during independence, four killings and we know the characters of the persons that were involved in those killings and therefore it is absolutely no surprise to any of us the reprisals that has taken place in the last couple days. What we were shocked at was the extent of those reprisals by members of different gangs.” he continued.
“The government could have very quickly imposed a state of emergency and why I prefer a state of emergency is because the state of emergency holds the government in check, meaning that they have to come to parliament and make a request for an extension of the state of emergency, they have to explain why the state of emergency is going to be in and for how long, and then they have to provide reports of everything they do during the period of the state of emergency though there’s full accountability and that accountability is to parliament and the Governor General.”
“The government indicated tonight that they were concerned about the stigma of having a state of emergency and the impact it was going to have on tourism. Now let’s think of that for a moment, nine people were killed how many people have been killed for the year so far? Isn’t that the stigma that we should be concerned about? So the idea of putting on a state of emergency to address in the short term a crisis is to reaffirm to everybody the seriousness in which we take this.”
“The government attempted to spin it by saying that because we did not want the bill to go through all of its stages tonight, because we’ve only been given hours to go through this very important bill, one that contemplates penalizing innocent people possibly, equally to the guilty and giving tremendous discretionary powers to the police force, but yet the government didn’t address a critical issue people’s confidence in the police force is it an all-time low.” he said.
Chastanet reiterated that the United Workers Party is in support of anything that can strengthen the police effort in the south in particular but not at the expense of the civil liberties of persons and that the reputation of the police force needs to be addressed.
“We would have preferred if the government would have used a state of emergency for the localized problem until this bill would have had a chance to be reviewed by more people and to make sure that at no point that people’s civil rights or liberties were being compromised, and there were sections that I read that certainly, I think the government saw that there was a problem because even they were shocked to see that an ordinary police officer was being provided with those kinds of powers and in some instances an inspector and higher when these authorities were really for senior police officers and also for the judicial system to opine on.
I understand the sense of urgency but I don’t believe that a bad bill, as well as intended as it may be, is going to resolve the problems.”
Photo: Stock Media
