While Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has claimed that his Government was not aware of the contents of the Robert Sabga report, Hansard records have shown that former PNM governments of which he was a part, not only knew of the report but acknowledged its importance in informing policies to protect children.
On Monday, Rowley said, “All this time, I and my Government were totally unaware of the contents of a Sabga Report which is now being serialised in the media.”
He added, “Through the local media, I am now discovering that there was/is a Sabga Report produced by investigators who inspected and collected information from nine children’s homes and described some of the most awful conditions and treatment meted out by person/s associated with childcare and custody at the nation’s care centres.”
However, Parliament’s Hansard records have shown that 20 years ago - on November 19, 2000 - Independent Senator Prof Ramesh Deosaran spoke of the existence of the report and invited then Minister of Legal Affairs Camille Robinson-Regis to read it.
Deosaran was speaking during debate on a bill to amend the Children’s Authority Act.
“Raising the question of children’s homes provided an opening such as to remind us that almost 15 years ago there was a report on children’s homes, not only the problems in terms of administration and infrastructure, but the extent of incest and abuse in those homes, the degree of injury that took place in those homes. It is commonly called the Sabga Report. The gentleman who did the report under the then Ministry of Social Development was Mr Robert Sabga who had a destiny of his own, as High Commissioner to Canada. I would suggest that the Minister look at that report carefully, and while the Government is busy with the legislative aspects of this problem in terms of the substantive issue of children care, that particular report, together with another one, which had to do with situationally displaced children, be looked at in terms of the horrors facing children in those privately-run homes,” Deosaran said then.
Deosaran told the Senate the report had evidence of grave abuse of children.
“I certainly do not wish to call the names of those homes, but we have the evidence as to the extent, as I said, not only of sheer neglect, but hurtful injuries, sexual abuse, in homes to which the Government provides subsidies. I have suggested in such context that the Ministry of Finance have some overseeing powers over how those moneys which are allocated to those houses, are used. There have been instances following inquiries by different ministries that the moneys have not been used for the objectives that were intended. So I therefore wish to bring, with respect, to the attention of the various ministers involved, this matter of child-care and the abuse in these homes, using as leverage the two reports to which I referred,” he said.
Robinson-Regis acknowledged the existence of the report and told the Senate it was being used by the then government to inform policy.
“In fact, that particular Sabga Report was used by the then Ministry of Social Development to examine all the issues as they related to the care of children. The issues that were raised in that report were very revealing in circumstances where our society had depended on a number of foster homes to ensure care for our young children and for children who had suffered abandonment by their families. That report did, in fact, inform quite a number of the policies that were developed during that period, especially as they related to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,” Robinson-Regis told the Senate.
Hansard reports also showed the report was raised again on June 2, 2006, by former Minister of Social Development Manohar Ramsaran during debate on the Appropriation Bill.
“We appointed a committee which was headed by Dr Robert Sabga to investigate homes in this country, and that report is somewhere in the Parliament. It was laid in Parliament,” he said.
Dr Rowley has asked Acting Police Commissioner McDonald Jacob to find the report and to act on it.