Special Operations Bill passes Lower House

The Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Bill, 2026 has been passed in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives fol­low­ing a marathon sit­ting, with At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie say­ing the Gov­ern­ment is not promis­ing per­fec­tion from its lat­est crime-fight­ing mea­sure but will con­sid­er it a suc­cess if it de­liv­ers a steady and sus­tained re­duc­tion in vi­o­lent crime.

The Bill was passed short­ly af­ter mid­night on Sat­ur­day, af­ter the House sat for more than 13 hours on Fri­day.

Wrap­ping up the de­bate, Je­re­mie said the ul­ti­mate ob­jec­tive was a re­turn to peace, while ac­knowl­edg­ing that no piece of leg­is­la­tion could com­plete­ly erad­i­cate crime.

“Suc­cess looks like the state which I de­scribed in my open­ing. It is a re­turn to peace and the recog­ni­tion that there is no per­fec­tion on earth,” Je­re­mie said.

“A con­tin­u­ing re­duc­tion in the lev­els of vi­o­lent crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty in our coun­try is what we seek.”

The leg­is­la­tion, which re­places the Gov­ern­ment’s de­feat­ed Zones of Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions (ZOSO) Bill, es­tab­lish­es sev­en polic­ing dis­tricts across Trinidad and To­ba­go and cre­ates a frame­work for spe­cial op­er­a­tions to com­bat crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

With­in those dis­tricts, spe­cif­ic lo­ca­tions can be de­clared “closed ar­eas,” where en­hanced law en­force­ment pow­ers can be ex­er­cised for lim­it­ed pe­ri­ods.

Those pow­ers in­clude cur­fews, cor­dons, check­points, road clo­sures, re­stric­tions on en­try and ex­it and, in spec­i­fied cir­cum­stances, search­es with­out war­rants.

Un­like the pre­vi­ous ZOSO leg­is­la­tion, the Spe­cial Op­er­a­tions Bill does not ex­press­ly in­voke Sec­tions 4 and 5 of the Con­sti­tu­tion or seek pas­sage un­der Sec­tion 13, which would have re­quired a three-fifths ma­jor­i­ty.

The leg­is­la­tion in­stead passed by a sim­ple ma­jor­i­ty.

That is­sue formed a ma­jor part of the Op­po­si­tion’s crit­i­cism dur­ing the de­bate, with Port-of-Spain South MP Kei­th Scot­land ar­gu­ing that the leg­is­la­tion in­fringes con­sti­tu­tion­al rights and should there­fore have been passed with a spe­cial ma­jor­i­ty.

In his clos­ing con­tri­bu­tion, Je­re­mie re­ject­ed that ar­gu­ment.

He ac­knowl­edged Scot­land’s con­cerns sur­round­ing cur­fews, cor­dons and war­rant­less search­es, but main­tained that the Gov­ern­ment con­sid­ers the leg­is­la­tion a pro­por­tion­ate re­sponse to threats to pub­lic or­der.

“There is a le­git­i­mate ob­ject be­ing pur­sued, we say, by pro­por­tion­ate mea­sures,” Je­re­mie said.

He point­ed specif­i­cal­ly to par­lia­men­tary scruti­ny, ju­di­cial over­sight and the Bill’s sun­set clause as safe­guards sup­port­ing the Gov­ern­ment’s po­si­tion that the leg­is­la­tion is con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly pro­por­tion­ate.

The leg­is­la­tion con­tains a two-year sun­set clause, mean­ing the Act will ex­pire two years af­ter it comes in­to op­er­a­tion.

Je­re­mie al­so re­ject­ed Scot­land’s warn­ing that di­vid­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go in­to polic­ing dis­tricts could move the coun­try to­wards a po­lice state.

“The leg­is­la­tion does es­tab­lish po­lice dis­tricts. But po­lice dis­tricts don't equate to a po­lice state,” he said.

Re­spond­ing to crit­i­cism that some of the pow­ers con­tained in the leg­is­la­tion were dra­con­ian, Je­re­mie again main­tained that the mea­sures were pro­por­tion­ate and nec­es­sary to con­front vi­o­lent crime.

“We say that the mea­sures in the leg­is­la­tion are pro­por­tion­ate,” he said, adding that the leg­is­la­tion was “ex­act­ly what is re­quired to treat the scourge of crime that we all face in this coun­try to­day.”

The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al al­so de­fend­ed the role as­signed to the Pres­i­dent un­der the leg­is­la­tion.

Un­der the Bill, the Pres­i­dent can de­clare closed ar­eas and cur­fews by Or­der fol­low­ing an ap­pli­ca­tion from the Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty, once the statu­to­ry re­quire­ments are met.

Je­re­mie said the Pres­i­dent’s dis­cre­tion un­der the leg­is­la­tion was cir­cum­scribed, ar­gu­ing that polic­ing was an ex­ec­u­tive func­tion and that the pow­ers as­signed un­der the Bill were there­fore ex­ec­u­tive in na­ture.

All 26 claus­es and the sched­ule were ap­proved with­out amend­ment.

The Bill must now pro­ceed to the Sen­ate.