Bunting: Target illicit enrichment

Prosecutors and security officials should place greater focus on securing convictions for illicit enrichment as a strategic means of tackling crime and corruption.

That’s the view of opposition Senator Peter Bunting, the former national security minister who is pitching such prosecutions as largely uncharted territory in Jamaican jurisprudence.

Opinion polls have consistently shown the Jamaican public to be particularly cynical about perceived high levels of corruption among certain state officials.

The senator believes that now is as good a time to launch into deeper probes into public officials.

“What I think, if you do research, you would see that this has never been applied in our laws,” said Bunting during a Crime Monitoring and Oversight Committee (CMOC) press conference on Tuesday.

“I think there may be one or two cases where persons have been charged with illicit enrichment, but it clearly is an important tool that has been totally underexploited by law-enforcement and anti-corruption agencies.”

Jamaica showed negligible improvement on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2020, rising from a score of 43 to 44 out of 100, in a context where zero is deemed very corrupt and 100 is very clean.

The country is 69th out of 180 countries, up five places from 74th in the 2019 CPI ranking.

However, Jamaica remains the fifth most corrupt state in the Caribbean, according to the CPI ranking.

While reiterating the Opposition’s support for CMOC, Bunting suggested that the objectives and targets reviewed by the monitoring group needed to be revamped. CMOC periodically tracks operational and strategic deliverables of the national security apparatus.

He said it was time for those markers to evolve.

“They need to be under periodic review to respond to situational changes. Just as corporate organisations review their strategic plans, which may be three- or five-year plans, but they review it every year because it has to take into account what is happening currently, not the state of play a couple years ago when it was designed,” he said.

Meanwhile, Colonel Oral Khan disclosed that CMOC had several concerns about standards in the correctional services.

A review team was established to present standards for correction services facilities and human-capacity requirements from 2020 and beyond.

A presentation was conducted in September, after the June target was missed, identifying challenges and gaps and outlining improvement plans.

“CMOC, however, remains a bit concerned that although they are working to improve, we have not yet seen a standard to which they will aspire,” Khan told journalists.

“We know they are looking at international standards, but we have not yet seen where they will engage the standard which they must commit, whether in the medium or long term.”

Minister without portfolio in the Ministry of National Security, Senator Matthew Samuda, commended CMOC for its work over the 12-month period.

“I think it is important for the public to understand where we are going. It is not that there are no standards in corrections as it is now. They are wrapped up in the Corrections Act, corrections rules which are gazetted documents to which Corrections does adhere to,” he said.

Samuda said that a comprehensive review is under way with hope of transforming the Department of Correctional Services.

Samuda told the committee that a new block will be opened in weeks at the Rio Cobre facility for boys.

There will also be a new facility opening shortly for bedridden inmates at the Tamarind Farm adult correctional facility