At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi says there will be 12 vir­tu­al courts in op­er­a­tion across the coun­try by next week.

In an­nounc­ing the ex­pan­sion of his min­istry’s op­er­a­tions dur­ing the Min­istry of Health’s vir­tu­al dai­ly press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Al-Rawi said there will be four vir­tu­al courts at the Gold­en Grove Prison, four at the Max­i­mum Se­cu­ri­ty Prison, one at the East­ern Cor­rec­tion­al and Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Cen­tre, one at the Women’s Prison, one at the Port-of-Spain Jail and one at the Youth Train­ing Cen­tre.

The AG said six had been in op­er­a­tion over the past few weeks, with one of the vir­tu­al courts used to hear the emer­gency law­suit filed by talk show host Ian Al­leyne over his con­tin­ued hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tion at the Cau­ra Hos­pi­tal, where he is be­ing treat­ed for COVID-19.

Al-Rawi said the es­tab­lish­ment of the vir­tu­al courts would save the coun­try sig­nif­i­cant costs oth­er­wise spent on pris­on­er trans­port.

“We spend $80 mil­lion TT dol­lars a year in pris­on­er trans­port to and from the courts. Eighty mil­lion dol­lars on av­er­age, any­way from $60 to $80 mil­lion. The in­no­va­tion of the ju­di­cia­ry and in par­tic­u­lar the ex­ec­u­tive court ad­min­is­tra­tor, mas­ter Christie-Anne Mor­ris-Al­leyne, had come to sig­nif­i­cant­ly save this coun­try mon­ey,” the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al said.

He could not give the cost of es­tab­lish­ing the courts but not­ed they were able to make con­sid­er­able sav­ing be­cause they used con­tain­ers to build them.

“The con­tain­ers were pur­chased for a mat­ter of a cou­ple thou­sand dol­lars. And then we en­tered in­to the retro­fitting of them. I couldn’t give you the cost of that, but it’s a very mod­est cost in re­la­tion to that,” he said.

“Cab­i­net ap­proved im­me­di­ate­ly, the IT struc­tures to hire the per­son­nel etc to do it and we’re busy afoot at cre­at­ing these 12 courts across the sys­tem as I’ve iden­ti­fied. So what­ev­er it is, it is sig­nif­i­cant, but it is a lega­cy en­ti­ty be­cause we are go­ing to use it con­tin­u­ous­ly.”

How­ev­er, be­fore the press con­fer­ence was done, the AG con­firmed that two of the con­tain­ers used for the vir­tu­al courts were pur­chased for $70,000 each.

Al-Rawi said the con­tainer­ised courts were not the Gov­ern­ment’s first choice in terms of es­tab­lish­ing a re­mote court sys­tem, but he said it was a step to­wards a po­ten­tial re­al time court sys­tem which could aid in emer­gency hear­ing such as do­mes­tic vi­o­lence cas­es.

On the mat­ter of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al said his of­fice and the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty was “hard at work in op­er­a­tional­is­ing the Elec­tron­ic Mon­i­tor­ing Sys­tem.”

He said they were plan­ning to bring a bill be­fore Par­lia­ment to bring the sys­tem to life.

“This is im­por­tant as to how we man­age pris­on­ers who may be re­leased in Trinidad and To­ba­go and it’s al­so con­nect­ed to the is­sue of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence,” he said.

The T&T Po­lice Ser­vice re­cent­ly an­nounced that they had seen an in­crease in do­mes­tic vi­o­lence dur­ing the Stay-at-Home mea­sures in place to pre­vent the spread of COVID-19.