At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al Rawi’s rev­e­la­tion on Thurs­day that Trinidad and To­ba­go does not cur­rent­ly have a sys­tem for ad­vance in­for­ma­tion on sex of­fend­ers en­ter­ing T&T is wor­ri­some.

It arose when re­porters asked the AG how Ken­neth Pet­ty, the hus­band of Trinidad-born US rap­per, Nic­ki Mi­naj, was al­lowed in­to the coun­try for Car­ni­val.

Ac­cord­ing to the AG, T&T doesn’t have a visa arrange­ment with the US and so would not have been able to ac­cess such in­for­ma­tion.

Pet­ty ought not to have been giv­en clear­ance to en­ter the coun­try as eas­i­ly as he did.

He was con­vict­ed of first-de­gree at­tempt­ed rape in 1995 when he was 16. He served al­most four years for that crime but in 2006 he was back in prison for manslaugh­ter.

Court records showed that dur­ing his time be­hind bars he was cit­ed for nine sep­a­rate vi­o­la­tions, and got four months in soli­tary con­fine­ment as pun­ish­ment.

That a con­vict­ed sex of­fend­er was al­so al­lowed in­side the St Jude’s Home for Girls dur­ing his vis­it here, on­ly added in­sult to in­jury.

There is an ur­gent need now for the pur­suit of prop­er treaties to al­low bet­ter checks of those com­ing here, not on­ly from the US but from every oth­er coun­try as well.

The sys­tem worked well in April last year when Ja­maican dance­hall artiste, Bu­ju Ban­ton need­ed spe­cial per­mis­sion from Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Stu­art Young to en­ter the coun­try. Ban­ton had just fin­ished serv­ing a jail term in the US for con­spir­a­cy to traf­fic drugs.

Young’s po­si­tion was clear, “Bu­ju Ban­ton falls foul of our im­mi­gra­tion laws in Trinidad and To­ba­go. I have asked that it be con­veyed to the or­gan­is­ers of the con­cert that they need to make an ap­pli­ca­tion to the min­is­ter.”

Giv­en that the Im­mi­gra­tion laws were not ca­pa­ble of rais­ing a red flag on Pet­ty's crimes, we have more work to do.

We need mech­a­nisms to en­sure that this does not hap­pen again.

The AG of­fered some hope, how­ev­er, say­ing that as Gov­ern­ment works to re­place Cus­toms and Im­mi­gra­tion forms with har­monised forms, ad­vanced pas­sen­ger in­for­ma­tion sys­tems will come in­to ef­fect.

When that is done, “We’ll know who’s a sex of­fend­er or not,” he said.

But Al Rawi al­so told re­porters that Gov­ern­ment had sought a sex of­fend­ers law where a con­vict­ed sex of­fend­er’s pass­port could be stamped as such, “so Im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cers would know au­to­mat­i­cal­ly.”

He added, “the in­ter­est groups” didn’t want that for T&T and Gov­ern­ment had to com­ply or the ad­min­is­tra­tion wouldn’t have got­ten the “kind of sup­port we want­ed.”

In the wake of In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Day cel­e­brat­ed yes­ter­day, we en­cour­age the Gov­ern­ment and Op­po­si­tion to re­vis­it how we ad­dress these is­sues. Pet­ty pol­i­tics should not stand in the way of the safe­ty of our women and girls.