Kevon Felmine

De­spite a call by the Law As­so­ci­a­tion for the re­peal of the Bail (Amend­ment) Bill, 2015, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar says T&T can­not strive to fight crime while want­i­ng to scrap leg­is­la­tions aimed at cre­at­ing a safer T&T.Say­ing the bill was a good piece of law giv­en the re­quest from act­ing Com­mis­sion of Po­lice Stephen Williams and the sta­tis­tics on guns, Per­sad-Bisses­sar yes­ter­day not­ed that it was passed in the Sen­ate on Tues­day night with full sup­port of the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) and some In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors.

Speak­ing to re­porters af­ter dis­trib­ut­ing keys to dif­fer­ent­ly-abled Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (HDC) ap­pli­cants at SAPA, San Fer­nan­do, yes­ter­day, the PM said while re­peal was not an op­tion, the leg­is­la­tion con­tained a cen­sus clause that al­lowed them to re­view it in the fu­ture.She added: "We are still of the view that this is a good piece of law giv­en the cir­cum­stance that we have. We can­not say that we want to fight crime each day but when we bring very strong pieces of leg­is­la­tion we want to pull back.

"This kind of mea­sure was used for that pe­ri­od of time when we had all the kid­nap­pings. There was a sim­i­lar po­si­tion of no bail for 120 days for kid­nap­ping for ran­som."Giv­en the sce­nario now, where al­most 72 to 75 per cent of the mur­ders be­ing com­mit­ted are be­ing com­mit­ted by peo­ple hold­ing guns, we think it is a good mea­sure."Of course there is the cen­sus clause, in that it can be re­viewed at a fu­ture point in time but we af­firm with con­vic­tion that this is the way to go for­ward now."

She said Gov­ern­ment had heard con­cerns raised about pos­si­ble abuse of the law by cor­rupt po­lice of­fi­cers who would plant guns on cit­i­zens.Tak­ing that in­to con­sid­er­a­tion, she said the bill ini­tial­ly had a clause which stat­ed that once a per­son was found with or com­mit­ted a crime with a gun, it would be suf­fi­cient to de­ny the per­son bail.How­ev­er, she said Gov­ern­ment felt it would be too dan­ger­ous to the bill and opt­ed to de­ny bail to re­peat of­fend­ers.

Ver­nel­la stays

While ad­mit­ting that parts of Min­is­ter of State in the Min­istry of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Ver­nel­la Al­leyne-Top­pin's state­ment against Op­po­si­tion Leader Dr Kei­th Row­ley last week were in­ap­pro­pri­ate and de­spite con­tin­ued calls for her re­moval, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar again said yes­ter­day that she would not fire her.

She added: "I share the con­cerns with some cit­i­zens who felt that parts of her state­ment may not have been ap­pro­pri­ate. I dis­cussed it with her, she has apol­o­gised and I have ac­cept­ed her apol­o­gy. She re­mains as min­is­ter."She apol­o­gised un­re­served­ly with­in a short space of time. I think by the very next day she had apol­o­gised for, as I said, parts of her state­ment. "There are oth­er parts of her state­ments that still leaves a lot of ques­tions that have re­mained unan­swered at this time."