Editorial | No to usurpation of fundamental rights

IN THE mid-1970s, after Argentina’s military junta overthrew the government of Isabel Perón, people began to disappear. At first, it was Perónist agitators, then communist guerillas and left-wing socialists. Soon, the disappearances spread to student campaigners and people insisting on a return to democracy – or anyone who spoke up for democracy or spoke out against the junta. No one was immune.

Apologists for the military excused the disappearances as necessary for a re-establishment of order in Argentina after years of instability. By the time the so-called ‘Dirty War’ ended in 1983 more than 30,000 people had disappeared, including mothers and grandmothers who had campaigned to know what happened to their children. Most of those answers, with respect to specific victims, remain outstanding.

Argentina’s situation is one example of what often happens when people make these moral compromises, ostensibly in exchange for national security. Usually, it is men in uniform, or political leaders supported by such men, who make the case for this trade-off, whether in secret or from populist platforms.

Two things generally underline this premise to social stability. Mostly, it represents a failure of imagination – an incapacity to generate ideas for dealing with society’s problems. The abridgement or abrogation of rights is the easy way. Second, surrendering of rights becomes mission creep. Today, it is the accused gangland killer who is detained without charge or trial.

It is very unlikely that such behaviour will ever take place in Jamaica. Political leaders and the chief of the security forces adhere, respectively, to the limitations of constitutional power and paramountcy of civil authority. Nonetheless, it is right to call out any action or statements that could be interpreted as support for a derogation from these norms. Which is why we are concerned about recent remarks by the chief of staff of the Jamaica Defence Force, Brigadier General Rocky Meade.

Astonishingly, General Meade conflates people’s concerns over the use of states of public emergency as an ongoing crime-fighting measure, and insistence on the respect for constitutional rights in Jamaica, as support for murderers. That is a dangerous stretch in a country where nearly two-thirds (65 per cent) of the population – according to a 2019 Vanderbilt University report on attitudes to democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean – would favour a military coup in response to crime. Fifty-eight per cent would back a coup for the military to eradicate corruption.

At more than 1,300 murders annually, and over 46 homicides per 100,000, Jamaica has one of the world’s highest murder rates. Until last September when the Supreme Court ruled that the old law on which the Government based its emergency powers regulations was unconstitutional, states of emergency had emerged as the Government’s preferred responses to criminal violence. Brigadier General Meade has been a major advocate of the strategy, under which people were detained for long stretches without being brought to court.

SHIFT IN TRENDS

The Government and the security forces credited the states of emergency for declines in murders in 2018 and 2019. They now imply that its loss is responsible for a recent sharp uptick in homicides, despite other people’s argument that a shift in trends was obvious even before the court’s ruling. Brigadier General Meade will have none of that argument, complaining about Jamaicans who “do not have an appetite to forgo, temporarily, some of our rights in order to secure the right to life”.

He added: “Yes, we have human rights; we’re entitled to our freedom of movement and all of that. Yes, if you are not alive, you can’t exercise any of that ... . Yes, we are a liberal democracy, but … if we insist on all our rights, we may not be alive to enjoy them.”

More worryingly, the army chief equated the health authorities’ right to declare a response to a public health emergency and what he apparently feels ought to be the power of the security forces to isolate (as would be permitted when a state of public emergency is declared) someone with a gun, who is deemed a threat to the community. Ideas of separation of powers, grudging concession to the right to seek judicial review notwithstanding, is, hereby, a good way through the window.

As the constitutional lawyer and human-rights advocate Lloyd Barnett suggested, attempts at shortcuts and quick fixes do not usually work. The problem here is not adherence to democratic norms, but, as Dr Barnett says, “the ineffectiveness of the measures taken for the apprehension of criminals”.

The State’s preferred substitute for this failure, it seems, is the power to scrape up anyone, hoping that a real criminal is in the bunch. That, in effect, is not unlike the discredited Suppression of Crime Act, whose real utility was the easy power it gave to the police to arrest and detain people, until, after a quarter of a century, people accepted that it caused more harm than good.

Liberal democracies are hard to manage precisely because of the precepts upon which they are founded: the protection of rights and freedoms, including of those minorities and in whatever strata of society those rights cry for protection. We, like Dr Barnett, hope that “Jamaica never gets to the stage where it surrenders the human rights of its citizens to militarism”.