At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi says an up­dat­ed ver­sion of the Pub­lic Health Or­di­nance will make it much sim­pler for or­di­nary cit­i­zens to un­der­stand the leg­is­la­tion meant to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween es­sen­tial and non-es­sen­tial work­ers, as the coun­try will be par­tial­ly shut down when the or­der to pre­vent the spread of COVID-19 kicks in at mid­night Sun­day.

The AG was con­tact­ed for clar­i­ty on the is­sue af­ter the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions on Sat­ur­day sent out an up­dat­ed ver­sion of the Pub­lic Health Or­di­nance first pre­sent­ed on Fri­day.

Speak­ing at a press con­fer­ence on Fri­day be­fore the ini­tial or­der was sent out, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young de­tailed some of the ser­vices and busi­ness­es that are con­sid­ered es­sen­tial and non-es­sen­tial. Sat­ur­day’s up­dat­ed ver­sion of the or­der prompt­ed some cit­i­zens to be­lieve there were ad­just­ments made.

How­ev­er, the AG told the Sun­day Guardian that the first thing the up­dat­ed ver­sion did was to sim­pli­fy the lan­guage so that law en­force­ment of­fi­cers could eas­i­ly in­ter­pret the law and avoid ar­bi­trari­ness. Sec­ond­ly, he said it was meant to im­prove the ap­pli­ca­tion of it to cer­tain es­sen­tial ar­eas, in­clud­ing an­i­mal wel­fare shel­ters. In the first ver­sion, zoos were in­clud­ed bu not an­i­mal shel­ters. He said it al­so added cer­tain es­sen­tial of­fice providers like the Of­fice of Dis­as­ter Pre­pared­ness and Man­age­ment (ODPM) to the list­ing.

Fi­nal­ly, Al-Rawi said the sec­ond ver­sion bet­ter clar­i­fied how peo­ple can ap­ply the work from home pol­i­cy.

Com­ment­ing, for ex­am­ple, on the “con­fu­sion” over whether peo­ple could ex­er­cise in pub­lic, the AG said, “In the new ver­sion, you can ex­er­cise pro­vid­ed that you are not breach­ing the pub­lic lim­it of ten.”

He said the Gov­ern­ment will, how­ev­er, con­tin­ue to up­date and re­vise the reg­u­la­tion as the sit­u­a­tion evolves.

“As you know, this is a very flu­id and evolv­ing sit­u­a­tion so we took the op­por­tu­ni­ty, the of­fice of the AG, the Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and Min­istry of Health, to re­vise the reg­u­la­tion overnight. What we did is that we con­vert­ed a lot of the lan­guage in­to pos­i­tive as op­posed to neg­a­tive to make it eas­i­er for law en­force­ment to un­der­stand.”

He said he was al­so work­ing with re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al at­tor­ney gen­er­als so they are guid­ed by in­ter­na­tion­al best prac­tice in de­vel­op­ing the most suit­able laws to deal with the sit­u­a­tion.

“We have been very care­ful in bal­anc­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al rights. We are on the front­line in this coun­try in pre­vent­ing pan­dem­ic risk. I join my col­leagues through­out the Caribbean in Bar­ba­dos, Cay­man Is­lands, Turks and Caicos, Ja­maica, Be­lize. All of us have been work­ing in tan­dem. I talk to them dai­ly. We are in sync with each oth­er on the con­sti­tu­tion­al mea­sures that we are tak­ing,” he said.