Padarath responds to Beckles over Caricom address

Leader of Gov­ern­ment Busi­ness, Bar­ry Padarath, has is­sued a re­sponse to com­ments made by Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les Robin­son fol­low­ing the Prime Min­is­ter’s ad­dress at the 50th Meet­ing of the Cari­com Heads of Gov­ern­ment Con­fer­ence.

Padarath said the re­marks from the Op­po­si­tion Leader did not re­flect prin­ci­pled cri­tique. He said the Gov­ern­ment stands by state­ments made by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar at the con­fer­ence.

Padarath cit­ed na­tion­al crime sta­tis­tics, stat­ing that 627 mur­ders were record­ed in one year and that there was a 42 per cent de­cline in mur­ders in 2025. He said the fig­ures are sup­port­ed by of­fi­cial da­ta and re­flect pol­i­cy mea­sures im­ple­ment­ed by the ad­min­is­tra­tion.

He said the Prime Min­is­ter’s ad­dress at Cari­com out­lined Trinidad and To­ba­go’s po­si­tion on for­eign and se­cu­ri­ty pol­i­cy and af­firmed the coun­try’s sov­er­eign right to de­ter­mine its ap­proach.

Padarath al­so ref­er­enced the in­ter­nal vote with­in the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment in April 2025, stat­ing that Beck­les was se­lect­ed as Op­po­si­tion Leader by a 7–6 mar­gin among 13 elect­ed Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment.

He fur­ther re­ferred to her tenure as Am­bas­sador, stat­ing that there was no shift in for­eign pol­i­cy dur­ing that pe­ri­od. He said that un­der the for­mer ad­min­is­tra­tion, mur­ders in­creased over a ten-year pe­ri­od with­out sus­tained calls for ac­count­abil­i­ty.

Padarath said the Gov­ern­ment will con­tin­ue en­gage­ment with re­gion­al part­ners, ad­dress il­le­gal mi­gra­tion and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty mat­ters, and de­fend na­tion­al in­ter­est. He said the ad­min­is­tra­tion re­mains fo­cused on sov­er­eign­ty, se­cu­ri­ty and sta­bil­i­ty.