Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior po­lit­i­cal re­porter

Mem­bers of the pro­tec­tive ser­vices and some in the civ­il ser­vice will have to pro­vide hair, urine, blood, sali­va and cheek swab sam­ples, and have their faces and eyes scanned, un­der the pro­posed bill for bio­met­ric da­ta and drug and poly­graph test­ing.

Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds re­vealed this dur­ing yes­ter­day’s Par­lia­ment de­bate on the bill. De­bate con­tin­ues on an­oth­er day, since Par­lia­ment was yes­ter­day ad­journed to a date to be fixed.

The bill seeks to amend the Ju­di­cial and Le­gal Ser­vice Act, Chap. 6:01, the Prison Ser­vice Act, Chap. 13:02, the De­fence Act, Chap. 14:01, the Po­lice Ser­vice Act, Chap. 15:01, the Civ­il Ser­vice Act, Chap. 23:01, the Fire Ser­vice Act, Chap. 35:50 and the Fi­nan­cial In­tel­li­gence Unit of Trinidad and To­ba­go Act, Chap. 72:01.

It was first tabled in 2022 but de­bate was in­com­plete and the bill lapsed.

Hinds, who pi­lot­ed it again yes­ter­day, said work on the bill be­gan in 2018 when he, as Min­is­ter in the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al’s Min­istry, en­gaged the Law Re­form Com­mis­sion to con­sid­er mea­sures to en­sure mem­bers of the pro­tec­tive ser­vices and cer­tain of­fice hold­ers in the civ­il ser­vice are held to the high­est stan­dards of in­tegri­ty. This fol­lowed al­le­ga­tions that pro­tec­tive ser­vice mem­bers and cer­tain civ­il ser­vice mem­bers were in­volved in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty.

He said the bill might as­sist the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) in pros­e­cut­ing em­ploy­ees where their con­duct in­volves crim­i­nal of­fences, and the ex­is­tence of the mod­ern bio­met­ric da­ta iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem will serve as a de­ter­rent to em­ploy­ee mis­con­duct, as they stand the risk of be­ing more eas­i­ly iden­ti­fied.

Bio­met­ric da­ta al­lows for peo­ple to be iden­ti­fied based on recog­nis­able da­ta—fin­ger­prints, vein and eye pat­terns, voice recog­ni­tion.

“You’d have seen videos - peo­ple cov­er their head, nose, mouth and the on­ly thing that shows is their eyes. Hard to iden­ti­fy in nor­mal cir­cum­stances but fa­cial recog­ni­tion will eas­i­ly do that. This will help in­ves­ti­ga­tors to iden­ti­fy with greater cer­tain­ty,” he said.

Hinds said the nine-clause bill, which re­quires Op­po­si­tion sup­port for pas­sage, in­fringed sec­tions of the Con­sti­tu­tion, in­clud­ing the right to pri­vate life. Mea­sures pro­posed in the bill in­volve sub­ject­ing mem­bers of the pro­tec­tive ser­vices and pub­lic ser­vice to in­tru­sive process­es and pro­ce­dures. These in­clude hav­ing elec­tron­ic de­vices at­tached to their per­son for the pur­pose of mon­i­tor­ing and record­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal re­ac­tions dur­ing poly­graph ex­am­i­na­tions.

Hinds said many do this rou­tine­ly, as they use it on en­try in­to the TTPS and it is al­so done in vet­ted/spe­cial­ist units in all ser­vices when the oc­ca­sion aris­es.

He said in­for­ma­tion re­ceived will be stored in a data­base.

Not­ing that cit­i­zens al­ready give this in­for­ma­tion when they trav­el to oth­er coun­tries, Hinds al­so point­ed out that poly­graph­ing is a com­mon in­tegri­ty test.

He said even as Gov­ern­ment went to Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day "with ho­n­ourable in­ten­tion to pro­tect the peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go against crime and crim­i­nal­i­ty and ter­ror, there is a re­al­i­ty of ter­ror­ist at­tacks every minute every­where, every day in this world and once we ac­knowl­edged the fact that some pub­lic of­fi­cials do com­mit and/or sup­port ef­forts to steal from us or to harm us, for me this is easy, but we must scrupu­lous­ly fol­low the law and the fol­low the Con­sti­tu­tion.”

Hinds added: “So, we’re ask­ing the Par­lia­ment to use its priv­i­lege, au­thor­i­ty and pow­er to cre­ate the laws that are nec­es­sary so that we in Trinidad and To­ba­go can en­joy the ben­e­fits of the pro­tec­tion like oth­er coun­tries.”