Somewhere between the grief of the Bahamas, the anxieties of our school children who returned to their classrooms on Monday, the shenanigans of politicians who believe that “the race card” is there to be cynically deployed, et cetera, et cetera, there needs to be time to consider where sedition as a criminal offence ought to be rationally located in the public discourse.
In countries with an interest in achieving or maintaining political maturity, there tend to be groundswells of human rights contention on a wide variety of fronts covering popular civil and political rights, and expanding into the vast horizon of economic, social and cultural rights.
People in such environments also more or less understand or wrestle with the conceptual requirements of humanitarian law, refugee rights, and other national and international obligations that otherwise exist under the cover of obscene darkness in countries such as ours.
Newspaper space, broadcast time, and online activity spark imaginations activate latent interest and converge at times to influence public policy and behaviour. True, some spectacular exemplars of the past appear hopelessly adrift and lost, but there is still something of an assurance that both public and private institutions remain capable of intervening decisively if push should ever come to shove in such places.
Here, except for the work of a handful of largely voluntary organisations, there isn’t a strong tradition of people routinely organised to protect the rights of others.
If there is one area of apparent and broad bipartisan agreement, it is that our country is best governed with a minimum dose of respect for human rights. Capital punishment, the denial of reproductive rights, and a refusal to attend definitively to gender rights are not big issues for political quarrels. They’re not there in elections manifestoes and are rarely debated in parliament.
So, we enter the sedition debate with the understanding that few people in the corridors of power are instinctively attracted to a notion of more, rather than fewer rights. That’s why nobody is particularly holding their breath on this one.
If you look at the issue long and hard enough, you would realise that introducing a meaningful framework for discussing sedition as a law in T&T requires an enlightened examination of rights in general and how they work in democratic states.
So, in a real sense, debating the Sedition Act should probably not begin with a discussion on the Sedition Act.
In my view, one substantive constitutional issue is whether people believe that expression (speech, literature, art, music etc) ought to be criminalised as a matter of course. For while it is widely-agreed that freedom of expression is not an absolute right, there is the accompanying truism that incursions (outside of balanced and proportionate civil recourse) into the exercise of such a right can have a “chilling effect” on expression—an undesirable condition in any democracy.
This was, in fact, the core argument of those of us addressing direct and indirect assaults on free speech and freedom of the press at the time of the Panday Green Paper on media reform 25 years ago, and our (partially successful) campaign to have criminal defamation eliminated from our statute books in 2013.
I followed the related parliamentary debate pretty closely at that time and found it interesting that almost everyone in the House of Representatives, and many in the Senate, were of the view that “we should lock-up” anyone found guilty of criminal offences under the Libel and Defamation Act.
It is almost the same principle now attracting our attention. I use the word “almost” because there are sharp divisions, even in the international human rights community, on the question of acceptable derogations of the right to free expression in instances where there is “dangerous speech.”
Some of us are stumped on this valid concern, but remain committed to framing the conundrum in a manner to err on the side of more, rather than fewer freedoms; especially against the backdrop of a challenging social media environment.
For, there are indeed instances in history when “gun talk” has produced deadly bullets, but even more occasions when this has not been the case.
What is needed here is for knowledgeable, independent people to lead a discussion on the fundamentals. Prof Rose Marie Belle-Antoine and a few others have already spoken out in nuanced tones. MATT has made some sensible points. But where is everybody else? Or should we just leave it so?