Griffith warns PDO law gives ministers too much power

For­mer com­mis­sion­er of po­lice Gary Grif­fith is warn­ing that Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Pre­ven­tive De­ten­tion Or­der (PDO) leg­is­la­tion gives too much unchecked pow­er to the Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty and could be abused by fu­ture gov­ern­ments.

In a state­ment on Mon­day, Grif­fith said his con­cerns were not di­rect­ed at the cur­rent hold­er of the of­fice or any re­cent de­ci­sion in­volv­ing the use of a PDO, but at what he de­scribed as a fun­da­men­tal flaw in the leg­is­la­tion.

He ar­gued that the law al­lows a min­is­ter to au­tho­rise the de­ten­tion of a per­son for months with­out bail or any mean­ing­ful right of ap­peal based on what the min­is­ter con­sid­ers to be “cred­i­ble in­tel­li­gence”, even where there is in­suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence to lay crim­i­nal charges.

Grif­fith said this means po­lice can be di­rect­ed to ar­rest and de­tain some­one with­out ev­i­dence be­ing pre­sent­ed in court, with­out wit­ness state­ments and with­out enough proof to sup­port a crim­i­nal charge.

He urged the pub­lic to con­sid­er how the law could be used if a fu­ture gov­ern­ment ap­point­ed a min­is­ter will­ing to abuse those pow­ers.

Grif­fith said laws should not be judged sole­ly on the in­tegri­ty of the per­son cur­rent­ly hold­ing of­fice but on how they could be used by some­one with less re­gard for de­mo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples.

He al­so ques­tioned whether Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Con­sti­tu­tion con­tains suf­fi­cient safe­guards to pre­vent abuse of such au­thor­i­ty.

Ac­cord­ing to Grif­fith, the law could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly be used against hold­ers of the coun­try’s high­est of­fices, in­clud­ing the Pres­i­dent, the Prime Min­is­ter, the Chief Jus­tice or the Di­rec­tor of Pub­lic Pros­e­cu­tions, if a min­is­ter claimed to pos­sess cred­i­ble in­tel­li­gence against them.

He ar­gued that such pow­ers could be used to threat­en po­lit­i­cal op­po­nents or even Cab­i­net col­leagues, de­scrib­ing the sce­nario as un­like­ly but pos­si­ble un­der what he con­sid­ers to be de­fec­tive leg­is­la­tion.

Grif­fith main­tained that the is­sue was not the present Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter or the cur­rent Gov­ern­ment, but the con­cen­tra­tion of pow­er in the hands of a sin­gle po­lit­i­cal of­fice­hold­er.

“The is­sue is not who holds the pow­er to­day. The is­sue is that no politi­cian should ever be giv­en such unchecked pow­er,” Grif­fith said.