Unfair and unjust

Parliament's decision to extend interim legislation to allow police to detain suspects for an extended period should be reconsidered.

IF STATISTICS provided by Opposition spokesman on national security, Peter Bunting during a debate in the lower house last Tuesday are credible and reliable, Jamaicans should be worried about Parliament s decision to give the police the right to detain suspects, without charge for up to 72 hours.

Bunting, who claims to have been quoting from police statistics, said detainees are held for between five and 12 days before being charged.

He said the statistics also point to one man being detained for 42 days without being charged.

When such statistics as put against the 48 hours or two days which obtained, in some measure, before the draconian Interim Detention Act was put in place last year, it suggests that the state has legitimised the abuse of human rights, and in most instances, the victims are poor young men from inner-city communities.

The Gavel is not unmindful of the dangerous environment in which we live and neither are we of the view that the state can afford not to act.

In fact, the beheading of four persons in a little more than one week speaks volumes as to the dog-hearted nature of the criminals who prey on the society.

These criminals must be hunted down and severely punished. The State must make an example of them and also make it unattractive for other persons to even contemplate similar actions.

But in the quest to apprehend and punish criminals, the State ought not to legitimise breaching the constitution. We have always felt and we remain even more convinced that legislation such as the one renewed in Parliament last week, is counterproductive and will result in nothing more than the abuse of human rights by the police.

Harassment

This business of the police picking up an individual who is believed to have committed, is in the process of committing a crime, or is likely to commit a crime, and holding them for three days without charge, smells like harassment to us.

It is even worse when these persons, who are guaranteed under the Constitution, to be brought to court within a reasonable time, are kept for up to 42 days without bail.

The Charter of Rights, unanimously passed in Parliament recently, states that: Any person who is arrested or detained shall be entitled to be tried within a reasonable time and (a) shall be (i) brought forthwith or as soon as is reasonably practicable before an officer authorised by law, or a court; and (ii) released either unconditionally or upon reasonable conditions to secure his attendance at the trial or at any other stage of the proceedings; or (b) if he is not released as mentioned in paragraph (a)(ii), shall be promptly brought before a court which may thereupon release him.

The Gavel does not believe it is unreasonable to ask the police to charge someone within 24 hours.

Sharon Hay-Webster, representative for south central St Catherine, has said communities are able to breathe whenever the police pick up persons of interest. It was on that basis that she voted for the interim act to be retained.

But neither Hay Webster nor the other MPs who spoke in support of the measure recognise that it is merely a sticking plaster which is being applied to cover the murky underbelly of state failure in several abandoned communities.

The police need to do real detective work - investigate and get the evidence to secure convictions in court. At the same time, the State must remove all incentives to criminality; it must create a just society, creating for the first time at last, equality of opportunity for all the people.

We admit that crime cannot be fought with a text book, but certainly it cannot be fought with draconian legislation, bullets and assault rifles. What is required is a more cerebral and less emotional approach to crime fighting. This involves not only acknowledging the rights of all Jamaicans, but also respecting those rights.