Richard?Lord

For­mer Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tor Fitzger­ald Hinds re­turned to the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, say­ing last week Mon­day's na­tion­wide po­lice road­blocks were more like the work of Isis. He was sworn in as a tem­po­rary sen­a­tor for the ab­sent Faris Al-Rawi be­fore leg­is­la­tors be­gan de­bate on the Bail Amend­ment Bill, which was pre­sent­ed by At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Garvin Nicholas. He spoke about the es­tab­lish­ment of a gun court in the coun­try.

Hinds, who spoke af­ter Nicholas, said the Op­po­si­tion would sup­port the mea­sure but in­sist­ed the so­lu­tion to all the coun­try's crime and oth­er prob­lems would be "to see the back of the (Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship) Gov­ern­ment."

Com­ment­ing on the shut­down of the coun­try just over one week ago, when po­lice ini­ti­at­ed road­blocks across the en­tire coun­try, in­clud­ing To­ba­go, Hinds said the Gov­ern­ment had "lost con­trol for at least 24 hours."

He said none of the se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies had any pri­or knowl­edge of the ac­tion. "Not the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter, no­body knew it was com­ing–not SSA, not SIA, not NSOC (NOC), not the chair­man of the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil–no­body knew," he stressed.

Hinds said, "It was al­most like it was Isis, Mr Pres­i­dent," he added.

Hinds, whose ap­point­ment as a sen­a­tor was re­voked in De­cem­ber 2013, told leg­is­la­tors he kept his promise to re­turn to the Cham­ber.

He said the Gov­ern­ment was "the biggest threat to the peo­ple of T&T." Hinds said he felt "more threat­ened by you (Govt) than I feel by the hands of mis­cre­ants out there with their dirty lit­tle guns."

He said the Par­lia­ment was mis­led in 2011 when it passed the Ad­min­is­tra­tion of Jus­tice (In­dictable Pro­ceed­ings) Bill in No­vem­ber of that year.

Hinds said while the Gov­ern­ment said it would re­duce the back­log of over 120 cas­es in the na­tion's courts "the up­shot of that was two of their friends sim­ply walk free."

He was re­fer­ring to the ex­tra­di­tion mat­ters in­volv­ing busi­ness­men Steve Fer­gu­son and Ish­war Gal­barans­ingh. They are want­ed by the US for mat­ters aris­ing out of the Air­port De­vel­op­ment Project un­der the for­mer UNC regime.

Hinds said the ex­ist­ing bail sys­tem "is al­most chaot­ic," adding that the Gov­ern­ment had not fixed the ex­ist­ing prob­lems.

Ac­cord­ing to the ex­plana­to­ry note, the bill seeks to amend Sec­tion 5 of the Bail Act to re­strict bail in re­spect of cer­tain spec­i­fied of­fences that in­volve the pos­ses­sion or use of a firearm.

It says the amend­ment would pre­clude a court from hear­ing an ap­pli­ca­tion for bail from a per­son charged with the of­fences re­ferred to in the pro­posed sec­tion un­less no ev­i­dence is tak­en with­in 120 days from the read­ing of the charge.

It al­so pro­vides for the leg­is­la­tion to be re­viewed by Au­gust 15, 2016.