Criminal defence attorney urges more disclosure on ZOSO plan

Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­[email protected]

Crim­i­nal de­fence at­tor­ney Ul­ric Sker­ritt is urg­ing Gov­ern­ment to di­vulge more in­for­ma­tion on the in­tro­duc­tion of Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions (ZOSOs), as he feels most of the pub­lic is still not aware of what such a strat­e­gy would en­tail.

The Law Re­form (Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tion) (Spe­cial Se­cu­ri­ty and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Mea­sures) Bill, 2026, was de­bat­ed in the Sen­ate on Tues­day. De­bate is sched­uled to con­tin­ue to­mor­row.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia about the planned law yes­ter­day, Sker­ritt, who is al­so a for­mer po­lice of­fi­cer, said while he has not read the de­tails be­hind the pro­posed strat­e­gy, greater con­sul­ta­tion and clear­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion was need­ed on the part of Gov­ern­ment, even be­fore the bill was brought to Par­lia­ment for de­bate.

He al­so raised con­cerns over the ex­e­cu­tion of ZOSOs, as he felt it was be­ing used as a means of con­tin­u­ing a state of emer­gency (SoE) in spe­cif­ic ar­eas.

“The fact is that what­ev­er they can do in re­la­tion to get­ting in­to peo­ple’s hous­es with­out a war­rant, they can do that with a war­rant the same way, be­cause it doesn’t take long for a po­lice of­fi­cer to go to a jus­tice of the peace and get a war­rant to search some­one’s house and even if they want to keep some­one in their house, they can sur­round the house and have an of­fi­cer get the war­rant ... it doesn’t take long,” he said.

“So, I re­al­ly don’t see the need for it ... I ba­si­cal­ly see it as an at­tempt to have an­oth­er state of emer­gency in an­oth­er way.”

Sker­ritt al­so ar­gued that the con­cept of a ZOSO would in­fringe on the rights of law-abid­ing cit­i­zens, as they would al­so be af­fect­ed by height­ened po­lice ac­tiv­i­ties.

In a me­dia re­lease on Tues­day, the Law As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (LATT) of­fered its sug­ges­tions for the bill, not­ing that their com­ments were not sought be­fore the bill was read be­fore it was first read in the Low­er House last Fri­day.

Among the sug­ges­tions put for­ward was the manda­to­ry use of body-worn cam­eras (BWCs) for po­lice of­fi­cers while in the field.

Re­fer­ring to the bill, which states that BWCs will be worn “as far as is pos­si­ble hav­ing re­gard to avail­able re­sources,” the as­so­ci­a­tion said more strin­gent arrange­ments to en­sure op­er­a­tional over­sight were need­ed.

“The ex­pe­ri­ence of our mem­bers has been that this has been used as a ready ex­cuse not to use cam­eras. Giv­en that the cre­ation of zones re­sult in the sus­pen­sion of some con­sti­tu­tion­al rights, we rec­om­mend that it be made com­pul­so­ry that body cam­eras be used or some oth­er record­ing de­vice,” LATT said.

The as­so­ci­a­tion al­so rec­om­mend­ed that law en­force­ment au­thor­i­ties iden­ti­fy them­selves or pro­vide their reg­i­men­tal num­bers when con­fronting peo­ple they sus­pect may have been in­volved in a crime.

Re­fer­ring to Sec­tion 18(3) of the bill, which pro­vides that a mag­is­trate may or­der a de­tainee to ap­pear be­fore the High Court, the as­so­ci­a­tion sought clar­i­ty on how long a sus­pect would re­main in cus­tody af­ter be­ing tak­en be­fore the court, the time lim­it a sus­pect can be de­tained with­out charges be­ing laid and if a sus­pect should be re­leased if there are de­lays in lay­ing charges.

Ques­tions were al­so raised as to what specif­i­cal­ly would qual­i­fy as “rea­son­able sus­pi­cion” for of­fi­cers to tar­get peo­ple be­lieved to be in­volved in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties.

As part of over­sight, the LATT al­so rec­om­mend­ed that a new clause be in­clud­ed in the bill where a stan­dard search record cap­tur­ing the grounds for sus­pi­cion and whether a BWC was turned on.

In cas­es where a body cam­era was not worn, the as­so­ci­a­tion not­ed that a writ­ten ex­pla­na­tion should be pro­vid­ed why.