PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

All the checks and bal­ances have not been done with re­gard to the In­ter­cep­tion of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Act 2020, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said yes­ter­day.

In a news con­fer­ence held dur­ing the tea break of yes­ter­day’s Par­lia­ment set­ting, the Siparia MP ex­pressed con­cerns that the pro­posed amend­ments will grave­ly af­fect lawyers.

“One fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple that it af­fects as I men­tioned is le­gal pro­fes­sion­al priv­i­lege, it al­lows in­ter­cep­tion of com­mu­ni­ca­tion from prison which should not be hap­pen­ing in the first place. Then says le­gal pro­fes­sion­al priv­i­lege is not ex­empt­ed un­less it is done in a place des­ig­nat­ed by the min­is­ter or on a des­ig­nat­ed de­vice. The bill re­al­ly is say­ing lawyers speak­ing to client, sor­ry we’re go­ing to in­ter­cept you. You’re not ex­empt­ed for in­ter­cep­tion. Now that abil­i­ty to freely com­mu­ni­cate with a lawyer is very fun­da­men­tal law,” said Per­sad-Bisses­sar, who al­so used the news con­fer­ence to serve a warn­ing to jour­nal­ists.

“Con­fi­den­tial ma­te­r­i­al, I thought it best to bring it to the at­ten­tion of the me­dia be­cause the me­dia is go­ing to be se­vere­ly af­fect­ed by this. Con­fi­den­tial jour­nal­is­tic ma­te­ri­als and sources of jour­nal­is­tic in­for­ma­tion will be im­pact­ed up­on and of course sub­ject to be­ing in­ter­cept­ed and be­ing held and used against per­sons. I think that right of a jour­nal­ist is al­so an­oth­er fun­da­men­tal right, not to dis­close sources but if they could be in­ter­cept­ing your da­ta,” said Per­sad-Bisses­sar, who claimed that these pro­vi­sions could be more wor­ry­ing than claims of da­ta-min­ing, mak­ing ref­er­ence to the Cam­bridge An­a­lyt­i­ca fi­as­co.

The Op­po­si­tion leader al­so ex­pressed reser­va­tions about plans to im­ple­ment the law retroac­tive­ly, stat­ing that when the law was last amend­ed and her gov­ern­ment learned that cer­tain top of­fi­cials had been sub­ject to phone-taps, they did not at­tempt to use the law in that man­ner, but in­stead made the ad­just­ment go­ing for­ward.

“We didn’t go retroac­tive. Law should al­ways speak per­spec­tive­ly, to go for­ward. If some­thing was not il­le­gal in the past you can­not go now to­day to in­crim­i­nate some­thing that at the time was not il­le­gal. That is how the law should op­er­ate, this goes against the grain of that fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple,” said the Op­po­si­tion leader.