Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Fitzger­ald Hinds’ an­nounce­ment of the fu­ture es­tab­lish­ment of a spe­cial court to deal with mat­ters of hu­man traf­fick­ing and sex­u­al of­fences has come against a back­drop of a rag­ing pub­lic de­bate on the is­sue in light of the top­ic be­ing raised in the Par­lia­ment re­cent­ly.

Ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter Hinds, Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie put this process in mo­tion when he is­sued a “Prac­tice Di­rec­tion” via the Trinidad and To­ba­go Gazette on Jan­u­ary 23, 2023.

This move es­sen­tial­ly puts in train a process that will pri­ori­tise all traf­fick­ing in per­sons and sex­u­al of­fence cas­es for han­dling by a spe­cial court with­in the Crim­i­nal Di­vi­sion of the High Court.

Al­ready, ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter Hinds, the Ju­di­cia­ry has iden­ti­fied judges and mag­is­trates for the court, the ul­ti­mate goal sup­pos­ed­ly be­ing to en­sure cas­es of this na­ture are fast-tracked once the process gets go­ing.

It is wor­ry­ing, how­ev­er, that the mat­ter is seem­ing­ly be­ing giv­en high pri­or­i­ty fol­low­ing Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s claim that a 2022 US Traf­fick­ing in Per­sons re­port ref­er­enced the al­leged in­volve­ment of an Op­po­si­tion par­lia­men­tar­i­an in hu­man traf­fick­ing ac­tiv­i­ty.

Truth be told, hu­man traf­fick­ing, es­pe­cial­ly of Venezue­lan na­tion­als, is noth­ing new to T&T and has been one of the worst-kept se­crets of our so­ci­ety.

Al­lowed to blos­som with­out any in­ter­ven­tion from law en­force­ment for decades, how­ev­er, Min­is­ter Hinds now has to ad­mit it is a prob­lem which has the propen­si­ty to af­fect T&T’s fu­ture diplo­mat­ic re­la­tion­ship with the Unit­ed States should it not be prop­er­ly ad­dressed.

Fur­ther­more, the mud­sling­ing be­tween politi­cians on both sides of the di­vide on the is­sue has brought to the fore the fact that the is­sues high­light­ed in the US re­port were al­ready on the radars of both ad­min­is­tra­tions long be­fore it was gen­er­at­ed. Yet, here we are still bick­er­ing about what should have been done and what needs to be done, giv­ing cit­i­zens no re­al hope that ul­ti­mate­ly, de­ci­sive ac­tion will come at some stage to pro­tect the women and chil­dren who find them­selves vic­tims of this in­hu­mane act.

Min­is­ter Hinds would al­so be aware that the court sys­tem is but part of the chain in an in­te­grat­ed process in­volv­ing oth­er ar­eas of law en­force­ment. One link is the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice and its abil­i­ty to in­ves­ti­gate, pros­e­cute and con­vict the per­pe­tra­tors of these acts.

Hu­man traf­fick­ing is al­so one as­pect of transna­tion­al crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty con­nect­ed to oth­er ar­eas, in­clud­ing drug and gun smug­gling. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, due to rogue el­e­ments with­in law en­force­ment, the hu­man traf­fick­ers are able to forge links which en­able them to op­er­ate with im­puni­ty in many in­stances.

It will, there­fore, take much more than a spe­cial court to erad­i­cate the prob­lem if, of course, the Gov­ern­ment is gen­uine­ly se­ri­ous about do­ing so.

Need­less to say, we hope that this project is not a fan­ci­ful ges­ture to ap­pease the pub­lic’s cur­rent anger. Cit­i­zens have been promised such mech­a­nisms in the past, a la the Night Court ex­per­i­ment, on­ly for them to die un­nat­ur­al deaths as they failed to make any re­al im­pact in the dis­pen­sa­tion of jus­tice.

As such, we hope both Min­is­ter Hinds and Chief Jus­tice Archie have de­vel­oped a plan to take us to a bet­ter place on this mat­ter.