Geisha Kow­lessar

Ro­man Catholic Arch­bish­op Joseph Har­ris has called on so­ci­ety and by ex­ten­sion po­lit­i­cal par­ties to stop play­ing the blame game and to fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing the so­ci­ety.He was one of the speak­ers at the launch yes­ter­day of the Code of Eth­i­cal Po­lit­i­cal Con­duct and the Coun­cil for Re­spon­si­ble Po­lit­i­cal Be­hav­iour at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, Port-of-Spain.

Say­ing old habits were hard to break, Har­ris urged: "We as a peo­ple have de­vel­oped cer­tain habits which are not the best and the code seeks to help us to change those habits and build bet­ter habits where pol­i­tics and can­vas­ing and cam­paign­ing are con­cerned."He hoped that through the code a new cul­ture would be built but said that would not be achieved overnight.

"We don't ex­pect to have 100 per cent com­pli­ance im­me­di­ate­ly, even though I sup­pose all of that would be wel­comed, but we do hope that the code would help us so that ten years from now we could look back and say, 'Yes our po­lit­i­cal cul­ture has changed.'"And not a peo­ple who fo­cus on the char­ac­ter as­sas­si­na­tion but on the projects, the ideas, the phi­los­o­phy and the de­vel­op­ment which we all seek for our coun­try," Har­ris added.

Head of the coun­cil, Dr Bish­nu Ra­goonath, when asked whether he be­lieved po­lit­i­cal par­ties had bro­ken the code, said:"I am not say­ing they have bro­ken the code. Po­lit­i­cal par­ties may have crossed the line in some in­stances but as of now as we go for­ward we would like to see that they abide by the code."He added the onus was al­so on the po­lit­i­cal par­ties to ed­u­cate their mem­bers re­gard­ing their be­hav­iour.

"A lot of this code does not on­ly re­late to the lead­ers or the plat­form speak­ers but al­so sup­port­ers of the par­ty and how these sup­port­ers would be­have... do you go and de­face oth­er peo­ple's posters and that sort of thing?" he asked.Asked to com­ment on whether he be­lieved the UNC's poster, say­ing "Hide your chil­dren from Row­ley", should be pulled down Ra­goonath said he was un­aware of such a poster.

He said the coun­cil had no pow­ers of sanc­tion and all it could do was to use moral sua­sion in the hope the par­ties, can­di­dates and sup­port­ers would hold to the val­ues and prin­ci­ples as out­lined in the code."We need to pro­mote a po­lit­i­cal cul­ture that is far bet­ter than what cur­rent­ly ex­ists," Ra­goonath added.

in­fo

The Coun­cil For Re­spon­si­ble Po­lit­i­cal Be­hav­iour was set up to en­cour­age moral, law­ful and re­spon­si­ble con­duct dur­ing this year's gen­er­al elec­tion.Last Ju­ly the coun­try's main po­lit­i­cal par­ties re­ceived for con­sid­er­a­tion a copy of the code which was put to­geth­er by a com­mit­tee led by Har­ris and sev­er­al civ­il so­ci­ety groups.

They in­clud­ed the In­ter Re­li­gious Or­gan­i­sa­tion (IRO), Catholic, An­gli­can, Methodist and Pres­by­ter­ian Church­es, Sanatan Dhar­ma Ma­ha Sab­ha, the An­ju­man Sun­nat ul Ja­maat As­so­ci­a­tion (AS­JA), T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce, T&T Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute, Women's Net­work of NGOs, the T&T Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers As­so­ci­a­tion and the Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Work­ers' Union.

The code was en­dorsed last Sep­tem­ber by the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC), Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM), Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP), In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al Par­ty (ILP) and Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ).

The code's ob­jec­tives

The code is in­tend­ed to achieve the fol­low­ing ob­jec­tives:

�2 Fos­ter­ing of democ­ra­cy through peace­ful, free and fair elec­tions, con­duct­ed at reg­u­lar in­ter­vals in which vot­ers are per­mit­ted to cast their bal­lots freely, with­out in­ter­fer­ence, fear, in­tim­i­da­tion or bribery.

�2 Pro­mo­tion of re­spect for hu­man rights, the pur­suit of civ­il and po­lit­i­cal lib­er­ties, the tol­er­ance of di­ver­gent opin­ions, full and ac­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion of all in the po­lit­i­cal process.

�2 En­cour­ag­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion in the elec­toral process by the Peo­ple and to up­hold their right to make po­lit­i­cal choic­es.

�2 Pro­mot­ing an elec­tion process free from vi­o­lence