At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi says Trinidad and To­ba­go can­not af­ford to put sys­tems in place at this time to deal with refugees and asy­lum seek­ers.

How­ev­er, he has ad­mit­ted it is an im­por­tant dis­cus­sion for T&T to start hav­ing since tax­pay­ers will be the ones to foot the bill even­tu­al­ly when such things are put in place.

T&T has signed the 1951 con­ven­tion re­lat­ing to the sta­tus of refugees and its 1967 pro­to­col but is still yet to rat­i­fy them and there­fore refugees and asy­lum seek­ers are not pro­tect­ed by lo­cal law.

But in ex­plain­ing the rea­son for the de­lay on the laws to give teeth to treaty sign­ings yes­ter­day, Al-Rawi said, “When you sign an in­ter­na­tion­al con­ven­tion there are sev­er­al stages that you go through. You have ac­ces­sion im­por­tant­ly and then you have rat­i­fi­ca­tion. It’s not, in fact, one con­ven­tion, there are two con­ven­tions, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were two sep­a­rate con­ven­tions.

“T&T has not rat­i­fied these con­ven­tions. For in­ter­na­tion­al law to be­come lo­cal law, we have what we call a du­al­is­tic sys­tem of law, where you have to bring the in­ter­na­tion­al law in­to the par­lia­ment and then clothe it in lo­cal leg­is­la­tion,” Al-Rawi said.

“So af­ter rat­i­fi­ca­tion, which we have not done, you then go and deal with the step of in­ter­na­tion­al law com­ing by lo­cal law.”

How­ev­er, he said the is­sue was an im­por­tant one for the na­tion to en­gage in. But Al-Rawi said sta­tis­tics are need­ed to guide the pol­i­cy.

“The cur­rent rate flow out of T&T is ap­prox­i­mate­ly 20-40 peo­ple per year, so it means that we’re sign­ing on as a coun­try—to en­gage in hold­ing all of the peo­ple in your lo­cal pot, with a rate flow out of 20-40 peo­ple per year. That’s a dy­nam­ic that this coun­try has to analyse to make sure that we can ac­tu­al­ly af­ford to deal with that,” he said dur­ing an event mark­ing In­ter­na­tion­al Men’s Day host­ed by the Bankers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T.

“Now put aside that point, that is on­ly one of the points, the oth­er as­pect is, well what oth­er sys­tems can we en­gage in and in fact there are pro­to­cols that we’ve en­gaged in right now, in terms of ac­cess to health­care, cer­tain ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion etc. So we’re work­ing our way around the pe­riph­eries of it. We’re in con­stant dis­cus­sions with all of the en­ti­ties.”

On whether T&T can man­age the refugee/asy­lum sit­u­a­tion right now, the AG said, “The math is, are we pre­pared from a pol­i­cy per­spec­tive to man­age this per­spec­tive right now, be­cause once you turn that key, then you cre­ate rights and oblig­a­tions which are ac­tion­able and then you have to be pre­pared to op­er­a­tionalise that law. One can­not eas­i­ly jump in­to a sit­u­a­tion, know­ing that you can’t op­er­a­tionalise im­me­di­ate­ly.

“...It has to be done in a phased per­spec­tive and I want to point out to you: The UK is one of the few coun­tries in the world that has rat­i­fied the con­ven­tion. So you got to re­al­ly do your home­work to see what oth­er peo­ple are do­ing as well. This is not some­thing that one en­gages in an ad-hoc knee-jerk re­sponse. It has to be very care­ful­ly con­sid­ered and that work is be­ing done.”

Con­tact­ed yes­ter­day, co­or­di­na­tor of the Min­istry for Mi­grants and Refugees at the Liv­ing Wa­ter com­mu­ni­ty, Rochelle Nakhid, em­pha­sised that many coun­tries world­wide have ac­ced­ed to the 1951 Con­ven­tion and have cod­i­fied this in­to do­mes­tic leg­is­la­tion, in­clud­ing small coun­tries like Be­lize, Ugan­da and all of Latin Amer­i­ca.

“The ma­jor­i­ty of the world’s refugees re­main host­ed in de­vel­op­ing coun­tries and they con­tin­ue to ex­plore in­no­v­a­tive ways of in­te­grat­ing them. Most im­por­tant­ly, the le­gal frame­works adopt­ed serve to pro­vide a prin­ci­pled ba­sis for the pro­tec­tion of rights,” Nakhid said.

“Non-re­foule­ment, or the prin­ci­ple of no re­turn, is the cor­ner­stone of refugee law and is al­so part of cus­tom­ary in­ter­na­tion­al law, mak­ing it bind­ing on states. This prin­ci­ple states that refugees should not be re­turned to where their life may be in dan­ger.

“Most refugees re­main for many years in their host coun­try and make sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to its de­vel­op­ment. Re­set­tle­ment is on­ly re­served for the most vul­ner­a­ble, which is less than 1% of all refugees world­wide.”

As de­fined by Ar­ti­cles 2(1) and 15 in the Vi­en­na Con­ven­tion on the Law of Treaties 1969, ac­ces­sion is the act where­by a state ac­cepts the of­fer or the op­por­tu­ni­ty to be­come a par­ty to a treaty al­ready ne­go­ti­at­ed. Note­wor­thy, is that it has the same le­gal ef­fect as rat­i­fi­ca­tion and there­fore the state has an in­ter­na­tion­al oblig­a­tion un­der cus­tom­ary in­ter­na­tion­al law to re­frain, in good faith, from acts that would de­feat the ob­ject and purées of the treaty, a lo­cal at­tor­ney fa­mil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion stat­ed.