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Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Media Association urges protection of whistleblowers

by

20121015

Fol­low­ing is the full state­ment is­sued to­day by the Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

The Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion is dis­turbed by the news that a news­pa­per re­porter's phone records were re­cent­ly hand­ed over to an unau­tho­rised per­son.

The Sun­day Guardian of Oc­to­ber 14 re­port­ed that the phone records of a Guardian re­porter were giv­en to of­fi­cials of the Ch­aguara­mas De­vel­op­ment Au­thor­i­ty (CDA) af­ter the pub­li­ca­tion of a Sep­tem­ber 9 ar­ti­cle about the CDA.

Those records were ap­par­ent­ly re­quest­ed by the CDA in an at­tempt to find out who the re­porter's sources were.

The Con­sti­tu­tion guar­an­tees the right of the in­di­vid­ual to re­spect for his pri­vate and fam­i­ly life and free­dom of the press.

On­ly the po­lice or cer­tain oth­er law-en­force­ment agen­cies may law­ful­ly ob­tain the phone records of any in­di­vid­ual, and then on­ly if they have a war­rant is­sued by a judge. The In­ter­cep­tion of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Act spec­i­fies the con­di­tions which must be met for such a war­rant to be grant­ed.

No na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies or is­sues were in­volved in this in­ci­dent, which rep­re­sents not on­ly an in­va­sion of the re­porter's pri­va­cy but al­so an at­tack on the free­dom of the press and hence on the democ­ra­cy of this coun­try.

The me­dia are fre­quent­ly the on­ly means through which whistle­blow­ers in both the pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tors are able to bring wrong­do­ing to light with­out risk to them­selves. This is be­cause the me­dia have pre­vi­ous­ly been able to guar­an­tee the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of their sources.

This con­fi­den­tial­i­ty is now un­der threat, if pri­vate in­di­vid­u­als are able to by­pass the law and un­earth the iden­ti­ty of such sources.

If whistle­blow­ers can no longer speak to the me­dia in safe­ty, then cor­rup­tion, waste, mis­man­age­ment and many forms of in­jus­tice may go unchecked.

The Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion urges that this very se­ri­ous in­ci­dent should be ful­ly and rapid­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ed by TSTT and the po­lice, and those in­volved brought to jus­tice if, as it ap­pears, the law has been bro­ken.

Matt ex­ec­u­tive


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