Anti-crime friction

Interest groups wrestle over proposed laws

Livern Barrett, Gleaner Writer

SOME OF the country's private-sector leaders want the proposed anti-crime bills being debated in Parliament to be enacted swiftly, even though local human-rights groups have pointed to major flaws in the proposed statutes.

While human-rights advocates argue that at least one of the bills is "offensive" to the Jamaican Constitution, the very powerful Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) said it supports the objectives of the bills.

"We are not lawyers, so we cannot say they are absolutely correct legally, but we support the issues that they contain and would like to see them enacted in the soonest time," said Peter John Thwaites, chairman of the PSOJ's national security committee.

President of the equally influential Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC), Milton Samuda, argues that while the proposed bills might be flawed, "they are not hopelessly flawed that they have to be placed in the trash basket".

He pointed out that the flaws

could be corrected as the crime bills made their way through Parliament.

"The Jamaica Chamber of Commerce supports the passage of the bills in whatever is the final agreed form," he told a Gleaner Editors' Forum yesterday.

The crime bills were crafted nearly two years ago as part of the Government's attempt to stem the rising crime rate.

murder statistics

According to police statistics, 752 persons were murdered during the first five months of this year.

This means an average of close to five murders were committed daily in the first 151 days.

However, the Independent Jamaica Council for Human Rights (IJCHR), which has studied the proposed bills, said in many instances they were "alien to common law, alien to statute, and alien to the Constitution."

IJCHR chairman, Arlene Harrison-Henry, singled out one of the proposed bills which allows for the extended detention of an accused person for up to 72 hours at the discretion of a justice of the peace.

"Now, this is a completely new standard that is alien to our law, and our position is quite simply that constitutional principles must be upheld and maintained," Harrison-Henry explained.

"The police have, for a very long time, been detaining people for long periods of time even without this piece of legislation, and we are not to encourage it," she added.

However, pointing to the escalating murder rate, Thwaites, who is also chairman of Crime Stop, said the security forces were now fighting terrorists.

"Any country that has the crime rate we have and that has the number of murders we have on an escalating basis is dealing with terrorism," Thwaites told the same forum.

"Therefore, I feel it is not possible for us to deal with the terrorists in the same way that civil society would deal with criminals," he stressed.

Human-rights groups Jamaicans for Justice and Families Against State Terrorism also raised concerns about another provision in the anti-crime bills which would allow the police to detain - for 60 days - persons who have allegedly committed other crimes while on bail.

livern.barrett@gleanerjm.com