The Ju­di­cia­ry is de­fend­ing and stand­ing by its pol­i­cy on vir­tu­al hear­ings in crim­i­nal mat­ters, stress­ing that peo­ple charged with of­fences must ap­pear on the same day via video link with­out be­ing trans­port­ed to a cour­t­house.

It al­so dis­missed crit­i­cisms that hav­ing vir­tu­al hear­ings at po­lice sta­tions makes them vir­tu­al cour­t­hous­es.

“This arrange­ment does not con­vert po­lice sta­tions in­to court­rooms – it just puts the ac­cused in front of a com­put­er for a vir­tu­al ap­pear­ance,” the Ju­di­cia­ry clar­i­fied in a state­ment.

On Thurs­day, Crim­i­nal Bar As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Is­rael Khan, SC, called on Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie to ex­plain why vir­tu­al courts are still op­er­at­ing out of po­lice sta­tions.

Khan com­ment­ed on the is­sue af­ter Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Roger Alexan­der called on the Ju­di­cia­ry to va­cate po­lice sta­tions. The mat­ter was first raised when the Po­lice So­cial and Wel­fare As­so­ci­a­tion held talks with Min­is­ter Alexan­der. The as­so­ci­a­tion had said that it had been try­ing, un­suc­cess­ful­ly, for the last two years to re­gain con­trol of po­lice sta­tions and have courts re­turn to ju­di­cial build­ings.

As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent ASP Gideon Dick­son had said since COVID-19 was over there was no longer a need for vir­tu­al courts to op­er­ate out of po­lice sta­tions and apart from the se­cu­ri­ty risk of hav­ing wit­ness­es and ac­cused com­min­gling in po­lice sta­tions, there was al­so the fi­nan­cial bur­den of main­tain­ing the space al­lot­ted for the court.

Dur­ing the post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence on Thurs­day, Jus­tice Min­is­ter De­vesh Ma­haraj said the Gov­ern­ment will be meet­ing with Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie soon in the hope of un­der­stand­ing the state of courts around the coun­try and oth­er re­lat­ed is­sues.

How­ev­er, in a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day, the Ju­di­cia­ry de­fend­ed the use of vir­tu­al hear­ings, say­ing that de­part­ing from it would af­fect the op­er­a­tions of the jus­tice sys­tem.

“The Ju­di­cia­ry would not like to re­vert to a low­er and slow­er lev­el of ac­tiv­i­ty caused by the in­abil­i­ty to have vir­tu­al hear­ings, or to the high ex­pen­di­ture re­quired by hav­ing to trans­port all ac­cused per­sons for each and every ap­pear­ance or ad­journ­ment.”

It said for all sub­se­quent hear­ings, in­clud­ing tri­als, ac­cused per­sons are ex­pect­ed to ap­pear from one of three lo­ca­tions: a prison if they are not on bail, a Ju­di­cia­ry Vir­tu­al Ac­cess Cus­tomer Cen­tre (VACC), or a court­room where the mat­ter is be­ing heard in per­son. Some VACC fa­cil­i­ties are lo­cat­ed with­in court build­ings.

The Ju­di­cia­ry un­der­scored that the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) had pre­vi­ous­ly ad­vised that it could no longer staff the courts ex­cept for hear­ings in­volv­ing pris­on­ers in the dock. It said this lim­i­ta­tion cur­rent­ly shapes how the Ju­di­cia­ry op­er­ates. To sup­port vir­tu­al ap­pear­ances, the Ju­di­cia­ry has re­quest­ed the TTPS pro­vide se­cu­ri­ty at VACC fa­cil­i­ties when need­ed.

The state­ment said all types of cas­es—in­clud­ing do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, civ­il, fam­i­ly, and ap­peals—are now fa­cil­i­tat­ed vir­tu­al­ly or in hy­brid for­mats, which com­bine in-per­son and vir­tu­al par­tic­i­pa­tion.

In its state­ment, the Ju­di­cia­ry said pub­lic feed­back to this mea­sure has been “ex­cel­lent”, though im­prove­ments re­main on­go­ing to fur­ther en­hance con­ve­nience and ef­fi­cien­cy.

The Ju­di­cia­ry al­so high­light­ed sev­er­al ben­e­fits of the sys­tem, such as en­abling le­gal of­fi­cers and at­tor­neys to hear mat­ters in­volv­ing wit­ness­es lo­cat­ed both lo­cal­ly and abroad and re­duc­ing the fi­nan­cial bur­den of trans­port­ing pris­on­ers for every hear­ing or ad­journ­ment.

It added, “The Ju­di­cia­ry looks for­ward to meet­ing with the Ho­n­ourable Min­is­ter to dis­cuss this and oth­er mat­ters in sup­port of ear­ly ac­cess to jus­tice.”