In large households, there are subsets … the big ones and the little ones. As the fourth of seven children, I was both and neither, and pivoted up or down depending on the benefits. Stay up late, or get sweet treats. My father, Michael Gordon, a senior police officer who helped to prosecute criminal cases, wanted me to become a lawyer. It was an ambition he wanted to realise through me, but I suspect that he also saw professional promise in my ability to argue both sides.
The professional and academic training of lawyers equip them to argue that black is white—or grey, in the case of Justice Frank Seepersad. Seepersad told reporters after a Christmastime church service that we don’t know enough about US Navy strikes on suspected drug smugglers, and “in the absence of the required evidence, a lot of that opinion is really speculative and the subject of conjecture.”
“Natural justice always requires the evaluation of all the available evidence before any judgement can be rendered,” Seepersad said, “and … we do not have all the evidence or the positions which have guided the actions which have been undertaken.”
“Therefore, it is really premature to proffer an opinion that what (has) occurred amounts to a breach of international law, or there is a violation of fundamental human rights.”
It was a surprising conclusion from a senior member of the bench. There’s a clear violation of the fundamental rights of the (now 115) people who had been subjected to instant execution without trial, with the sentencing magistrate being a US Navy Admiral monitoring their maritime progress on a video feed hundreds of miles away. On “the absence of required evidence”, that’s what courts of law are for, m’lud. The weightiest piece of information we already had was the absence of due process.
At the time that the learned judge made those comments, the issue had been exhaustively aired, analysed, and legally dissected. There was a considerable amount of publicly-available information (from reportage to congressional testimony) from which even a moderately well-informed person could draw reasonable conclusions.
As for “the positions which have guided the actions”, the US Justice Department has withheld the legal memo that justifies the strikes. The Department of Defense (referred to by the Trump administration as the Department of War) has withheld the full-length, unedited video of the killing of two shipwrecked survivors of the first strike, on September 2. By what judicial logic was Justice Seepersad giving the parties, intentionally withholding evidence, the benefit of any doubt?
Also, electing to withhold legal advice on the strikes was T&T Attorney General John Jeremie. He appeared at a news conference on January 14 to talk about crime-fighting initiatives, and I took the opportunity to get him on record—for the first time—on his assessment of whether the strikes were consistent with international law.
Yes, they were, he said, citing the opinion of “an international expert” whose advice he’d sought. He wouldn’t say who. In parliament, Opposition Leader Pennelope Beckles asked the AG to provide the opinion and who authored it. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar deflected, caused a mini uproar and effectively sidetracked Beckles’s inquiry. The answers are in the public interest.
At the press conference days earlier, the AG had declined to say whether he’d relayed the legal advice to the Prime Minister. “I’ve done my job”, he told me, “which is, make sure that the republic acts in accordance with law.”
Jeremie seemed, there, to be taking care to create a legal safe distance from the PM’s less carefully calibrated utterances on the issue. He also wouldn’t say whether US military assets had been deployed from Trinidad and Tobago territory—for the boat strikes, or the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. Defence Minister Wayne Sturge said days later that “I do not know, and if I was to hazard a guess, I would say it was not.”
It’s Sturge’s job to know—not guess—if or when T&T’s airports are utilised by another country … militarily and non-militarily.
The Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago (LATT) has a duty to weigh in. My wish for 2026, besides an abdomen of ice-cube definition, is for courage—in uncomfortable inquiry and principled dissent. We can genuinely like a country or person and be candid about their actions.
