Yvonne Ba­boolal

The Eu­ro­pean Union Del­e­ga­tion in T&T is con­cerned about the coun­try's crime sit­u­a­tion and traces it to the il­le­gal traf­fick­ing of drugs. That was stat­ed by Ger­man am­bas­sador Ste­fan Schlueter, who is hold­ing the EU pres­i­den­cy in T&T. "Crim­i­nals act out of a sense of im­puni­ty be­cause the crime de­tec­tion rate in T&T is very low," the am­bas­sador said at a me­dia con­fer­ence by the EU del­e­ga­tion at its Queen's Park West, Port-of-Spain, of­fice last Fri­day.

The del­e­ga­tion called the con­fer­ence to an­nounce its cel­e­bra­tion on Hu­man Rights Day of the award of the No­bel Peace Prize 2012 to the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU). It re­ceived £##930,000 and will add an­oth­er one mil­lion to be used for grants for chil­dren in war and con­flict zones world­wide, Daniela Tra­macere,?Charge d'Af­faires of T&T's EU Del­e­ga­tion said.

Tra­macere said the prize was award­ed to the EU in recog­ni­tion of its work on rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, democ­ra­cy, pro­mo­tion of hu­man rights and in en­larg­ing the area of peace and sta­bil­i­ty among Eu­ro­pean coun­tries and around the world. Asked about EU ac­tiv­i­ties in T&T, Tra­macere said it was al­ready work­ing with Cari­com's Im­ple­men­ta­tion?Agency for Crime and Se­cu­ri­ty (IM­PACS). "We are sup­port­ing ef­forts at the re­gion­al lev­el," she added

She said the fig­ures were more or less clear con­cern­ing crime in T&T and the Caribbean and re­ferred to the Cari­com draft of a re­gion­al crime strat­e­gy.

Tra­macere said ac­cord­ing to analy­ses done by the UN De­vel­op­ment Pro­gramme, crime was on the in­crease in the re­gion and the east­ern Caribbean con­tin­ues to be a trans-ship­ment point for il­le­gal drugs com­ing from South Amer­i­ca. The il­le­gal traf­fick­ing of drugs re­sult­ed in an in­crease in hu­man traf­fick­ing and small arms, lead­ing to more gang war­fare, Tra­macere added.

The EU is al­so think­ing of sup­port­ing the Min­istry of Na­tion­al?Se­cu­ri­ty's Cit­i­zens Se­cu­ri­ty Pro­gramme, which worked with peo­ple in at-risk crime com­mu­ni­ties, she said. The EU in T&T was al­so as­sist­ing in po­lice ser­vice and ju­di­cial re­form and the pre­ven­tion of mon­ey laun­der­ing, Schlueter said. He said it was work­ing on get­ting the "Mr Bigs" in the drugs trade but one of the chal­lenges in go­ing af­ter the big fish­es was an in­ad­e­quate wit­ness pro­tec­tion pro­gramme.

"There is a need to change the way to be a whis­tle blow­er," he ad­vised. Not­ing that the EU is heav­i­ly in­volved in T&T, Tra­macere said the or­gan­i­sa­tion al­so had been work­ing with non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions in agri­cul­ture and the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my.