Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh says pick­ing up peo­ple forcibly off the streets vi­o­lates their hu­man rights and is against the law."Even though you would have seen peo­ple be­ing picked up on the streets forcibly, that is wrong in hu­man rights and in the law," Ra­mad­hars­ingh said.He said the Gov­ern­ment was work­ing "very qui­et­ly but stead­fast­ly" on the laws and leg­isla­tive frame­work to help the 1,500 dis­placed peo­ple liv­ing on the streets in Port-of-Spain.

In an in­ter­view af­ter the launch­ing of the "Ray of Hope" ini­tia­tive with the staff of URP So­cial at The Vil­la, So­ci­ety Les Amantes De Je­sus se­nior cit­i­zens home at Sad­dle Road, La Pas­to­ra, San­ta Cruz, last Fri­day, Ra­mad­hars­ingh said: "These per­sons can­not re­al­ly claim to have hu­man rights and then en­dan­ger our in­no­cent cit­i­zens. We have to bal­ance that."We call up­on the law en­force­ment au­thor­i­ties to po­lice our streets and the men­tal health of­fi­cers to do their du­ty and pa­trol the cap­i­tal and en­sure they are able to con­trol the sit­u­a­tion."

Ra­mad­hars­ingh said when the laws were in place his min­istry could do its work com­fort­ably and be able to func­tion freely in the knowl­edge they were not in­fring­ing or tak­ing away the hu­man rights of any­body.He de­scribed Port-of-Spain may­or Louis Lee Sing's at­tempt to re­move street dwellers as a "failed method."He said for one it was il­le­gal, it was risky, and gave the sce­nario if some­body had brought a con­sti­tu­tion­al mo­tion they wouldn't know what would have been the out­come.

Ra­mad­hars­ingh de­scribed the treat­ment of the home­less as "sub-hu­man" and there was a back­lash as more sto­ries be­gan to leak out about the har­row­ing ex­pe­ri­ences of the home­less be­ing held at the Cen­tral Mar­ket.He added: "That is not the way we want to treat peo­ple. "We want to en­sure there is dis­ci­pline and there's no crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty on their part."We want to en­sure too if that there is any hope in hu­man­i­ty that we can re­form an in­di­vid­ual by psy­cho­log­i­cal re­con­di­tion­ing and re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion to be­come a pro­duc­tive mem­ber of so­ci­ety."