Amnesty In­ter­na­tion­al is call­ing for im­me­di­ate mea­sures to pro­tect the rights of refugees in T&T. In a se­ries of four tweets yes­ter­day, the in­ter­na­tion­al non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion called on this coun­try to ho­n­our the in­ter­na­tion­al agree­ments it has signed by re­spect­ing the rights of asy­lum seek­ers and refugees. And it al­so con­demned a re­cent High Court judg­ment from Jus­tice Frank Seep­er­sad that opened the way for the de­por­ta­tion of mi­grants.

Hu­man rights groups have ar­gued that by not im­ple­ment­ing a refugee pol­i­cy, T&T is not ho­n­our­ing its rat­i­fi­ca­tion of the 1951 Con­ven­tion re­lat­ing to the sta­tus of refugees and re­lat­ed in­ter­na­tion­al agree­ments. They added that by sign­ing on­to these in­ter­na­tion­al con­ven­tions the coun­try in prin­ci­ple agrees to ho­n­our their dic­tates, not hav­ing the leg­is­la­tion to en­force these agree­ments puts the coun­try in a grey area.

Denise Pitch­er, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Caribbean Cen­tre for Hu­man Rights said the time has come for this coun­try to de­sign and im­ple­ment a refugee pol­i­cy.

The cen­tre’s re­port on last week­end’s raid of the bar in St James was linked to Amnesty In­ter­na­tion­al’s tweet that ar­gued the High Court rul­ing “jeop­ar­dis­es the rights of refugees.”

The tweet read: “A few days af­ter this rul­ing was is­sued, around 200 refugees, asy­lum seek­ers, and mi­grants, in­clud­ing chil­dren were de­tailed in a raid. Ac­cord­ing to the @cchr_tt this ac­tion has vi­o­lat­ed hu­man rights.”

Pitch­er said as it stands right now there is no sys­tem in place to treat the is­sue of mi­grants and refugees. “Be­cause we don’t have a safe mech­a­nism to ad­dress the in­flux and to ad­dress mi­gra­tion, it is pro­vid­ing a fer­tile ground for smug­gling and traf­fick­ing, and that is en­cour­ag­ing more per­sons to come through ir­reg­u­lar routes,” she said.

She said that reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion will al­so dis­suade po­ten­tial smug­glers and re­duce the rate of il­le­gal en­try. It will al­so give the Gov­ern­ment ac­cess to re­al da­ta on who has come in­to the coun­try, when, where and why.

At dis­pute is the prin­ci­ple of non­re­foule­ment, which means peo­ple must not be re­turned to a coun­try where their lives and free­doms would be threat­ened. How­ev­er, in Seep­er­sad’s rul­ing, he ar­gued that the prin­ci­ple does not ap­ply to T&T since it has not le­galised the process by which some­one can ap­ply for refugee sta­tus.

Amnesty In­ter­na­tion­al, in its tweet, called on the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter and Par­lia­ment to take “im­me­di­ate ac­tion to en­sure the re­spect of the hu­man rights of refugees and asy­lum seek­ers”.

Guardian Me­dia reached out to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds for com­ment but re­ceived no re­sponse up to late yes­ter­day evening.