In an at­tempt to com­bat ris­ing gang vi­o­lence in Cari­com, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley, who is the re­gion­al body’s lead on crime and se­cu­ri­ty, says steps are be­ing tak­en to strength­en laws to now treat gun vi­o­lence as an act of ter­ror­ism.

Speak­ing at the clos­ing me­dia con­fer­ence for the 48th Reg­u­lar Meet­ing of the Con­fer­ence of Heads of Gov­ern­ment in Bar­ba­dos last evening, Dr Row­ley an­nounced, “We agreed that notwith­stand­ing so­cial con­sid­er­a­tions, we agreed that the chang­ing na­ture of crime is such that ac­tions and acts of vi­o­lence in the pub­lic space in cer­tain in­stances must now be re­gard­ed as acts of ter­ror­ism.”

The T&T Prime Min­is­ter sought to ex­plain the need for leg­isla­tive change, which he an­tic­i­pates will be draft­ed in the com­ing months.

“We are talk­ing here now about in­dis­crim­i­nate shoot­ing in a pub­lic place where the per­pe­tra­tors en­dan­ger all and sundry. We be­lieve in or­der to ad­dress that, the leg­is­la­tion needs to be cog­nisant of what ex­act­ly we are deal­ing with now as against what the ex­ist­ing leg­is­la­tion an­tic­i­pat­ed and to that end, Heads sourced and ob­tained the ser­vices of a for­mer AG of Be­lize God­frey Smith, who has been tasked to re­view our leg­isla­tive tem­plates and to come up with new leg­isla­tive pro­pos­als for con­sid­er­a­tion by the heads for changes to be made on the leg­isla­tive side to treat with what are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing as op­posed to what we are sur­prised by.”

He added, “We al­so ex­pect that these acts, us­ing the tools of trade of the crim­i­nals at large in our com­mu­ni­ties from Ba­hamas to Suri­name, St Lu­cia to Trinidad and To­ba­go, that they be deemed to be acts of ter­ror­ism and al­low us to view them not on­ly by the ex­ec­u­tive but al­so by our ju­di­cia­ry and fash­ion the ap­pro­pri­ate leg­is­la­tion to do that.”

How­ev­er, Guardian Me­dia sought to point out that ef­forts in the past to de­clare crime a pub­lic health emer­gency and Cari­com de­clar­ing a ban on as­sault ri­fles had done noth­ing to ar­rest gang vi­o­lence in the re­gion and in par­tic­u­lar T&T.

Asked how de­scrib­ing it as an act of ter­ror would be any dif­fer­ent, Dr Row­ley replied, “What we are say­ing here is the ac­tions them­selves, be­cause they en­dan­ger peo­ple in­dis­crim­i­nate­ly, that is what makes them acts of ter­ror and then we need to craft our leg­is­la­tion to take that in­to ac­count to strength­en law en­force­ment and al­so to as­sist the ju­di­cia­ry in treat­ing with acts of that na­ture be­cause they are such a sub­stan­tial threat. So, it’s not the law we have in hand now but what we will re­view, mod­i­fy and present go­ing for­ward.”

Ja­maica Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness al­so sought to an­swer the ques­tion, em­pha­sis­ing that if the cur­rent spate of gang vi­o­lence is treat­ed as or­di­nary crim­i­nal­i­ty, then oth­er coun­tries can go the way of Haiti.

“I on­ly need to point to the sit­u­a­tion that ex­ists in Haiti and to just turn slight­ly from that to what we are see­ing emerg­ing in oth­er Cari­com coun­tries with gangs that are arm­ing them­selves de­lib­er­ate­ly, stock­pil­ing weapons, seek­ing to cap­ture com­mu­ni­ties and to cor­rupt pub­lic of­fi­cials. That should not be con­sid­ered or­di­nary crim­i­nal­i­ty, that is a threat to the state and Caribbean na­tions must face that square­ly and call it what it is, these are acts of ter­ror,” Hol­ness said.

He added, “And they are of­ten times transna­tion­al. Crim­i­nals in Trinidad may have links to crim­i­nals in Ja­maica, cer­tain­ly the crim­i­nals in Haiti are trans­port­ing guns to Ja­maica and pos­si­bly like­wise. Cer­tain­ly, crim­i­nals in Mi­a­mi, some of them, our na­tion­als are il­le­gal­ly traf­fick­ing weapons to Kingston.”

Bar­ba­dos PM Mia Mot­t­ley, who is al­so Cari­com’s chair, ad­dressed how this ap­proach is dif­fer­ent.

“One of the things we are dis­tin­guish­ing our­selves from pre­vi­ous meet­ings on is the com­mit­ment through the George-Bridge De­c­la­ra­tion to work to­geth­er but al­so to re­pur­pose ex­ist­ing re­gion­al in­sti­tu­tions to strength­en them at this very time, when the pos­si­bil­i­ty of oth­er states be­ing put sig­nif­i­cant­ly at risk in terms of their ex­is­tence and vi­a­bil­i­ty is im­me­di­ate. As An­drew (Hol­ness) said, we have the ex­am­ple of Haiti and we are com­mit­ted that in the con­text of a com­mu­ni­ty such as this, there has to be co­or­di­nat­ed ap­proach­es to in­tel­li­gence and in some in­stances we may have well have to con­sid­er how at a func­tion­al lev­el, we go be­yond sup­port­ing each oth­er.”

PM Mot­t­ley lament­ed, “This is not some­thing we want­ed to do but it is im­per­a­tive now.”

Dr Row­ley al­so an­nounced that Cari­com had agreed to ap­point a high-lev­el rep­re­sen­ta­tive on law and crim­i­nal jus­tice to form a strate­gic plan to mod­ernise the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem in the re­gion.