Richard Lord

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter, Mar­tin Joseph, says there is no new crime plan for im­ple­men­ta­tion in the coun­try at this time. He said this in re­sponse to ques­tions from re­porters at yes­ter­day's post-cab­i­net news con­fer­ence at the Diplo­mat­ic Cen­tre, St Ann's.

Joseph said Gov­ern­ment had en­gaged the ser­vices of a re­tired Ma­jor Gen­er­al, Cameron Ross "to do a re­view of the en­tire na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty ar­chi­tec­ture." He said Ross' re­port was sub­mit­ted and con­sid­ered by the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Coun­cil over a three-day pe­ri­od, and was sub­mit­ted to Cab­i­net for its con­sid­er­a­tion yes­ter­day. Joseph said the re­port con­tained 194 ma­jor rec­om­men­da­tions and 81 sub-rec­om­men­da­tions. The rec­om­men­da­tions were in­tend­ed to im­prove op­er­a­tions in a num­ber of agen­cies in­clud­ing the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­istry, the De­fence Force, In­tel­li­gence, Se­cu­ri­ty Ser­vices Agency, the Spe­cial An­ti Crime Unit and the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Asked if the one-man re­port iden­ti­fied any spe­cif­ic weak­ness in the ex­ist­ing na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty sys­tem, Joseph said he was not pre­pared to "pre-empt" the Cab­i­net.

Joseph then stressed that as far as the crime fight­ing ini­tia­tives were con­cerned, "progress was be­ing made and you could ex­pect in short or­der the pop­u­la­tion would be ad­vised as to how we would be pro­ceed­ing." He stat­ed al­so that leg­is­la­tion gov­ern­ing the op­er­a­tions of the Spe­cial An­ti-Crime Unit of T&T (Sautt) should be brought to Par­lia­ment be­fore the end of this year. On an­oth­er mat­ter, Joseph dis­closed that Cab­i­net has ex­tend­ed the life of the Crime and Jus­tice Com­mis­sion by one year. He said the ex­ten­sion was ap­proved be­cause Gov­ern­ment is try­ing to de­ter­mine whether it should re­main as a per­ma­nent en­ti­ty or re­placed by a new arrange­ment. Joseph said the Cab­i­net agreed to the es­tab­lish­ment of the com­mis­sion on Ju­ly 19, 2007. The Com­mis­sion's man­date was to eval­u­ate rec­om­men­da­tions on law en­force­ment and the jus­tice sys­tem which were made fol­low­ing crime talks across the coun­try.

It was al­so man­dat­ed to rec­om­mend to Cab­i­net the ap­pro­pri­ate le­gal frame­work for im­ple­men­ta­tion. The com­mis­sion is chaired by Jus­tice Li­onel Jones SC and has as mem­bers, Sen­a­tor Dana See­ta­hal SC; Gillian Lucky, at­tor­ney; Jacque­line Toney, teacher; Dr Karen Moore, psy­chol­o­gist; George His­lop, at­tor­ney; and Cather­ine Ali, me­di­a­tion con­sul­tant. Joseph said the com­mis­sion's first re­port was sub­mit­ted to Cab­i­net in Au­gust last year.