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Panic Attack
October 07, 2001
By Denis Solomon
IRONY is always one of the prime components of political crises, and the present situation in Trinidad and Tobago is replete with it. The nation's biggest ethnic cleanser proclaims "inclusion" as his watchword, and enemy number one of civil liberties poses as the defender of democracy.
Ramesh Maharaj is indeed vigorously promoting democracy in the UNC, where he himself stands in need of it. But in the country as a whole, his record speaks for itself. He attempted to curb press freedom with the Green Paper on the media. He tried to take control of the Judiciary. He withdrew from two international human rights conventions. He beefed up restrictions on the right of assembly with the amended Summary Offences Act. He restricted freedom of speech and the press with clause 7 of the Equal Opportunity Act, which he deemed to require a simple majority while restrictions on pitbull ownership needed a special majority.
Ramesh has not been too preoccupied with his quarrel with Panday to seize the opportunity provided by terrorist attacks in the USA to plan further assaults on civil liberties in Trinidad and Tobago. Last week he issued a press release announcing that he was drafting an Anti-Terrorist Bill to provide the country with a "modern legislative framework" to deal with the "new threats of terrorism".
This is somewhat different from the way he dealt with the old threats of terrorism, which was to bargain with the terrorists for their electoral support, in exchange for a promise to favour their claims for compensation against the State.
As I write, Ramesh is no longer Attorney General, at least for the moment, and his successor Kamla is probably too busy trying to defend her boss against her predecessor to concern herself with the business of the nation. She doesn't, in any case, have Ramesh's tenacity in the pursuit of nefarious ends.
But whoever ends up in Cabildo Chambers, the country may expect no change in the fundamental attitude of the authorities to civil liberties, which is to curb them to the greatest possible extent. After all, it was the PNM government that first restricted the right of assembly with the Summary Offences Act, and extended police right of search with the Firearms Act. These two laws, passed in 1972, incorporated the provisions of the Public Order Bill proposed by Karl Hudson-Phillips in 1970 but withdrawn after massive protests from many sections of society. One of our problems is that public memory is short, and the 1972 bills passed with little opposition.
Ramesh's "modern legislative framework" is in fact so modern that it doesn't yet exist in any other democratic country, and one part of it, the prohibition on incitement to religious hatred, already exists here. Both the United States and Britain are proposing draconian measures to fight terrorism. But the difference between those countries and Trinidad and Tobago is that in those countries the announcement alone of the government's intention has been enough to provoke loud protest from people concerned for the preservation of civil liberties, both on the left and the right. So far, no such protest has greeted Ramesh's announcement.
In the United States the opposition comes not only from civil libertarians in the Democratic party, but also from the far right of the Republican party, traditionally concerned with restricting the power of the State. In Britain, the proposals are being vigorously attacked not only by civil liberties groups but even by the right-wing press, intent on showing that a Labour government is fundamentally antagonistic to individual freedom.
The proposals in the United States and Britain seek mainly to give the authorities power to freeze the assets of suspected terrorist groups and to detain indefinitely, and deport, terrorist suspects. The key word in both cases is "suspect": the proposals run flatly counter to the principle of due process and the presumption of innocence. In Britain, they are also aimed at nullifying recent court decisions to the effect that detention of asylum seekers violates the Human Rights Act. This Act is the result of the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law.
David Blunkett, the British Home Secretary, has also attacked the right to judicial review of repatriation orders. Justice, he says, is not simply the protection of the minority against the majority, but also the opposite.
Judicial review is the British equivalent of the constitutional motions that Ramesh tried to abolish in this country, and then made such effective use of himself in his fight against the Judiciary and, by example, in the UNC's attempts to delay the election petitions against Gypsy and Chaitan.
Ramesh is already way ahead of the British proposals in one area: criminalising incitement to religious hatred. The Home Secretary is proposing to extend the law forbidding incitement to racial hatred to cover incitement to religious hatred, "to curb Muslim fanatics". Apart from the foolishness of believing that the dangerous fanatics of any cult are those who proclaim their fanaticism from the rooftops, the proposal disregards the fact that the law on incitement to racial hatred never worked very well anyway.
A good indicator of the gamut of forces opposed to the British government's proposals is an editorial in the right-wing Tory newspaper the Daily Telegraph, which says that the effect of the proposals would be "to damage the way of life they claim to be defending". Traditionally, it says, "English law has concerned itself with punishing deeds, not thoughts or words. If the law tries to stipulate what can or cannot be said about religious belief, we really are heading back towards the Middle Ages". Ramesh has made sure that if the British return to the Middle Ages, Trinidad and Tobago will be there to welcome them.
No government of Trinidad and Tobago has ever worried about punishing people for their words as opposed to their deeds. Ramesh did not wait for a terrorist threat to make incitement to religious hatred a crime. He did it, in clause 7 of the Equal Opportunity Act, not to counter a terrorist threat, but to appease the Maha Sabha and win the nuisance-value Christian sects, such as the Spiritual Baptists and the Pentecostals, away from the PNM.
What makes it worse is that the prohibition extends from real hate speech and writing to the work of calypsonians and other artists, not to mention journalism such as my own, in which I have frequently incited people to hate religion, not any particular sect but religion of any kind. It is also significant that the only amendment to the Bill that the Government accepted was the one that says you can only abuse one religion from the pulpit of another.
In Britain, a spokesperson for the human rights group Liberty says "We have human rights and judges to ensure that in times of panic and fear impartiality and fairness survive for everyone". Section 7 of our Equal Opportunity Act has yet to be tested in court. But given the temper of our judges, people with big mouths have little to hope for from them. Only the indignation of the public before such legislation gets on the books will prevent our governments from using "times of panic and fear" as an excuse for further inroads into freedom.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon