Ot­to Car­ring­ton

Se­nior Re­porter

ot­to.car­ring­ton@cnc3.co.tt

Even as a po­lice probe in­to the al­leged sex­u­al as­sault of a 21-year-old Venezue­lan mi­grant at the Ch­aguara­mas He­li­port is un­der­way, at­tor­neys rep­re­sent­ing the woman are claim­ing this in­ci­dent is one of many at the fa­cil­i­ty.

The Venezue­lan woman claimed she was sex­u­al­ly abused while de­tained at the Coast Guard-manned im­mi­gra­tion fa­cil­i­ty three weeks ago.

The is­sue was first raised by Caribbean Cen­tre for Hu­man Rights ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Denise Pitch­er dur­ing a Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) hear­ing on hu­man rights last Fri­day. Pitch­er said the woman had “gone miss­ing” af­ter she re­port­ed al­le­ga­tions of sex­u­al abuse at the He­li­port.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands the mi­grant fled the fa­cil­i­ty af­ter the al­leged as­sault but on Mon­day night, she was de­tained by Cen­tral Di­vi­sion po­lice and is now at the Im­mi­gra­tion De­ten­tion Cen­tre (IDC) in Aripo.

Speak­ing on be­half of their client af­ter meet­ing her at the IDC on Wednes­day, at­tor­ney Criston Williams said, “There have been nu­mer­ous cas­es we have been in­volved in, specif­i­cal­ly re­gard­ing sex­u­al of­fences, and there have been al­le­ga­tions of mod­ern-day slav­ery, al­le­ga­tions of se­nior women tak­ing ad­van­tage of young un­der­age girls. There have been al­le­ga­tions of rape and those are just some but there have been a lot of abus­es against the hu­man rights of mi­grants.”

In con­firm­ing the in­ci­dent to Guardian Me­dia, DCP Curt Si­mon said the woman was de­tained by the po­lice last Fri­day and trans­port­ed to the IDC. He said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion is still in its ear­ly stages be­cause it was de­layed due to the woman’s un­avail­abil­i­ty.

Dur­ing the vis­it to the IDC, lawyers were shown marks on the skin of the 21-year-old mi­grant al­leged to have been made dur­ing the as­sault.

Ad­dress­ing the is­sue of law en­force­ment of­fi­cers prob­ing their col­leagues, Williams said, “We have asked sev­er­al times for an in­de­pen­dent or­gan­i­sa­tion to con­duct an au­dit or analy­sis of the ac­tiv­i­ties at the He­li­port but those pleas have fall­en on deaf ears, ba­si­cal­ly. What hap­pens when mil­i­tary per­son­nel are in­volved in han­dling sen­si­tive top­ics, such as mi­grants? For ex­am­ple, we know that a ba­by has been shot and killed via an in­ter­cep­tion in the open seas. These in­ci­dents high­light the need for a com­pre­hen­sive re­view, not on­ly of the pol­i­cy but al­so of the en­tire leg­isla­tive frame­work.”

Cur­rent­ly, at­tor­neys are in talks with the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty to en­sure that safe­ty pro­vi­sions are be­ing put in place for the woman.

At­tor­ney Bernadette Arneaud added, “First and fore­most is the safe­ty of the vic­tim and the vic­tim’s fam­i­ly. I think we are very con­cerned and we are do­ing the nec­es­sary to en­sure the safe­ty of the vic­tim in these cir­cum­stances.”