Rachael Es­pinet

Amend­ments can be made to ex­clude spe­cif­ic groups of peo­ple, me­dia prac­ti­tion­ers in­clud­ed, from the pros­e­cu­tion un­der the Cy­ber Crime Bill.

This was an op­tion Gov­ern­ment Whip Dr Roodal Mooni­lal gave to mem­bers of the me­dia af­ter the week­ly cau­cus meet­ing at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter, St Clair, yes­ter­day.

Stat­ing that he did not want to speak out of turn, Mooni­lal said: "You could al­so look at ex­clu­sion claus­es... where you can ex­clude a group of peo­ple with el­e­men­tary oc­cu­pa­tion. You could even ex­clude by sec­tor.

"There is a way you could build the leg­is­la­tion to tar­get who might be the peo­ple most like­ly to of­fend as op­posed to the peo­ple who even if they of­fend may be a pub­lic in­ter­est mat­ter."

Mooni­lal said it was agreed at the cau­cus that there would be a small team to deal with the mat­ter.

The team is head­ed by Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath and will in­clude At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Garvin Nicholas, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Brigadier Gen­er­al Carl Al­fon­so and Food Pro­duc­tion Min­is­ter De­vant Ma­haraj.

Mooni­lal said a com­pre­hen­sive dis­cus­sion was held at the cau­cus where Al­fon­so gave a full ac­count of the bill and the con­sul­ta­tions that took place.

He said over the week­end the cau­cus al­so re­ceived com­mu­ni­ca­tions from sev­er­al or­gan­i­sa­tions giv­ing sug­ges­tions about the is­sue. How­ev­er, Mooni­lal said the rec­om­men­da­tions were not as de­tailed as the cau­cus would have want­ed.

At 10 am to­mor­row the team would meet at the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions with the ex­ec­u­tive from the Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (MATT) and the T&T Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ing As­so­ci­a­tion (TTP­BA) to dis­cuss their is­sues with the bill.

The claus­es Mooni­lal iden­ti­fied were 9, 13, 19 and 20.

"They would meet with MATT and TTP­BA to have a bit more de­tail on what they be­lieve to be the of­fend­ing claus­es and the some of the claus­es in some way that may be abused or vi­o­late their rights in some way," he said.

MATT and the TTP­BA is­sued state­ments ob­ject­ing to parts of the bill which they de­scribed as "wor­ry­ing" and "may ul­ti­mate­ly re­sult in the demise of our democ­ra­cy."

"We are well aware over the years of the ha­rass­ment of jour­nal­ists and it is not some­thing we would want to sit back and leg­is­late.

"It is some­thing we are very mind­ful of. So we will strike a bal­ance be­tween cre­at­ing new of­fences and new laws to deal with a new lev­el of crime with the use of tech­nol­o­gy and at the same time bal­anc­ing rights and work en­gines," Mooni­lal said.

He said the Gov­ern­ment would not vote on the bill to­mor­row but would wait for the re­port on the meet­ing with MATT and TTP­BA.

He said next Mon­day the cau­cus would re­ceive a re­port from to­mor­row's meet­ing on where it could make the nec­es­sary amend­ments in time for the Cy­ber Crime Bill to be de­bat­ed on Par­lia­ment next week Wednes­day.

"We in­tend to meet next week Mon­day to dis­cuss the mat­ter fur­ther so that if needs be ap­pro­pri­ate amend­ments are made be­fore we go to Par­lia­ment so that the de­bate may con­tin­ue be­cause there are sev­er­al speak­ers who need to deal with sep­a­rate is­sues.

"As you know this cy­ber crime leg­is­la­tion is a com­pre­hen­sive pack. We are deal­ing with cy­ber bul­ly­ing and a host of oth­er mat­ters so that we can con­tin­ue on Wednes­day so that we could con­tin­ue with in­ter­est­ed par­ties on Wednes­day morn­ing," he said.

Mooni­lal reaf­firmed Gov­ern­ment nev­er in­tent­ed to re­strict the free­dom of the press.