EDITORIAL - Rebuilding trust with allies

Among the lines by wags around town is that the commission of enquiry into the Christopher Coke extradition affair is causing an explosion of business for Claro, the number three player in Jamaica's mobile-phone market.

Crooks and bad men, the argument goes, are these days parking, or making scant use of, their Digicel and LIME instruments. Increasingly, too, philandering spouses are opting for Claro phones.

The punch line: that Claro phones are not covered by the secret memoranda of understanding (MOUs) signed by the former minister of national security, Dr Peter Phillips, circumscribing how Jamaica, the United States and Britain share information from intercepted communication.

Or, more precisely, Claro's name has not been mentioned by the lawyers for the governing Jamaica Labour Party and/or Prime Minister Bruce Golding in seeking to make the argument that the MOUs infringe the rights of Jamaicans to privacy and the freedom of communication.

The humour of the wags aside, this raises some fundamental issues that the Golding administration, and Jamaica, broadly, will have to address in the aftermath of the enquiry, if not before.

It would appear that the goings-on at the enquiry are likely to have seriously compromised, if not fatally damaged, Jamaica's intelligence-gathering capabilities and future cooperation with friendly nations.

Let's be clear. This newspaper believes in, and supports, the right of individuals to privacy, except in circumstances where their actions impact on public duty. In that regard, we believe there ought to be a higher bar to privacy and/or claims for defamation by public officials in their public roles.

But even among private officials, this right to privacy cannot be absolute, as reflected in the constitutions of even the world's most liberal democracies. There is often a tension between privacy and the security of the state, which the courts are sometimes called to resolve.

In Jamaica, part of the tension into which privacy collides is a homicide rate in excess of 55 per 100,000 population; that our country is a major narcotics trans-shipment port; and that money laundering and extortion are major profit centres for criminal gangs. Intelligence gathering, including communication intercepts, properly by order of the court, is an important tool in fighting this kind of organised crime.

Enquiry losing focus

Unfortunately, at the enquiry, whose primary role is to determine whether the Government behaved corruptly in stalling Coke's extradition, the secret MOUs, and Dr Phillips, who signed them, have been put on trial. Or, there has been an attempt at this.

In the process, despite the flimsy claims of some to the contrary, the scope of the MOUs, and the collaborative operations that they underpin, have been all but laid bare. Where we might have in the past speculated about programmes such as Operation Anthem, we now know that they exist and have a fair grasp of how they operate.

Whatever might be said, their integrity cannot be the same. Indeed, this element of the country's security apparatus has to be reconfigured, including trust with our intelligence partners.

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