Rachael Es­pinet

Gov­ern­ment is cur­rent­ly dis­cussing is­sues raised on the Cy­ber­crime Bill at their cau­cus meet­ing at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter in St Clair, Gov­ern­ment Chief Whip Dr Roodal Mooni­lal said ear­li­er to­day.

Mooni­lal said Gov­ern­ment de­cid­ed to re­vis­it the bill af­ter com­plaints raised about cer­tain as­pects of the bill by the Me­dia As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T, T&T Pub­lish­ers and Broad­cast­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion, In­de­pen­dent Lib­er­al Par­ty leader Jack Warn­er and sev­er­al oth­er in­ter­est groups and cit­i­zens over the last 72 hours.

The bill was brought back to the House last Fri­day, but Warn­er, MP for Ch­agua­nas West, was the on­ly op­po­si­tion present. He op­posed the bill, say­ing it would de­tract whistle­blow­ers and muz­zle jour­nal­ists.

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

Mooni­lal said this morn­ing that it is not the Gov­ern­ment's in­ten­tion to sup­press the me­dia or whistle­blow­ers with the leg­is­la­tion. He said the Gov­ern­ment de­cid­ed not to rush the bill on Fri­day af­ter they be­came aware of some of the is­sues raised.

"We de­cid­ed we would not vote on it on Fri­day last and we de­cid­ed to cau­cus to­day and I in­tend to raise some of the is­sues, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it re­lates to clause 9, clause 19 and 20," he said.

He re­it­er­at­ed that the Cy­ber­crime Bill is meant to pro­tect cit­i­zens and not "pe­nalise or in­tim­i­date cit­i­zens" or me­dia work­ers from do­ing their jobs or re­veal­ing un­law­ful acts.

Mooni­lal added that there will not be a re­draft­ing of the bill, but amend­ments will be made to fix the is­sues high­light­ed as prob­lem­at­ic.

"The amend­ments can be draft­ed on the floor. I did hear the com­ments and we do have sub­mis­sions from stake­hold­er groups that speak to amend­ments. That is some­thing we are look­ing at. If all goes well we can amend on the floor," he said.

He added that if there is a par­tic­u­lar clause that is pre­sent­ed as trou­bling, then the clause can al­so be delet­ed en­tire­ly. He said the ad­just­ments are nec­es­sary as there should not be any­thing hin­der­ing the bill be­cause it is a nec­es­sary piece of leg­is­la­tion.