Sascha Wil­son

No per­son ar­rest­ed dur­ing the state of emer­gency may file a com­plaint against the State with the Equal Op­por­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion (EOC) on the ground that he/she was dis­crim­i­nat­ed against be­cause of where he/she lives. EOC's le­gal head Naren­dra Lal Be­har­ry made this clear dur­ing an in­ter­view fol­low­ing an aware­ness ses­sion at City Hall,San Fer­nan­do. Since the State of Emer­gency took ef­fect last Mon­day the po­lice have been mov­ing in­to cer­tain ar­eas deemed "hotspots" where they have ar­rest­ed sev­er­al per­sons. Asked whether these per­sons could claim that they were tar­get­ed be­cause they live in par­tic­u­lar ar­eas, Lal Be­har­ry said: "It is in­ter­est­ing that you would raise that. Our Act does pro­vide that a per­son could lodge a com­plaint of dis­crim­i­na­tion on the ba­sis of ge­o­graph­i­cal ori­gin, so that is some­thing that we have not yet thought of."

He ex­plained that a com­plaint must be based on rel­e­vant grounds. For ex­am­ple, a com­plaint of dis­crim­i­na­tion could be based on sex, race, eth­nic­i­ty, ge­o­graph­i­cal ori­gin, re­li­gion, mar­i­tal sta­tus or dis­abil­i­ty, but it must be on rel­e­vant grounds such as em­ploy­ment, ed­u­ca­tion, ac­com­mo­da­tion, pro­vi­sions of goods and ser­vices, or dis­crim­i­na­tion by of­fen­sive be­hav­iour or vic­tim­i­sa­tion. "So it is not be­cause the gov­ern­ment chose a cou­ple of coun­ties to place un­der a state of emer­gency would they be al­lowed to lodge a com­plaint, un­less it re­lates to a ground of dis­crim­i­na­tion," Lal Be­har­ry said.

Ear­li­er in the pro­gramme Com­mis­sion­er Bev­er­ly Beck­les in­di­cat­ed that the ses­sion was be­ing held to ed­u­cate the pub­lic about EOC since a lot of peo­ple are still un­aware of its ex­is­tence and pur­pose. Lal Be­har­ry, the main speak­er, said since the Com­mis­sion's in­cep­tion in 2008 they had re­ceived 500 com­plaints, most of which re­lat­ed to the pub­lic sec­tor. He said, they are seek­ing to widen the am­bit un­der which per­sons could file dis­crim­i­na­tion claims. Among the changes they have rec­om­mend­ed are to in­clude age and HIV sta­tus as spe­cif­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics of dis­crim­i­na­tion.