Cod­i­fy­ing rules al­ready gov­ern­ing the Ev­i­dence Act will not make it bet­ter.

That is the view of the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) tem­po­rary sen­a­tor and crim­i­nal at­tor­ney Renu­ka Ramb­ha­jan made dur­ing her con­tri­bu­tion to the Ev­i­dence (Amend­ment) Act in Sen­ate yes­ter­day.

Sen­ate de­bat­ed the Ev­i­dence (Amend­ment) Act which seeks to pro­vide for the use of dif­fer­ent iden­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­ce­dures, in­ter­views and oral ad­mis­sions, spe­cial mea­sures ev­i­dence by video link.

Ramb­ha­jan spoke just af­ter Gov­ern­ment sen­a­tor Renu­ka Sagram­s­ingh-Sook­lal and said while they share a first name, they do not share an opin­ion on this de­bate.

“I sug­gest re­spect­ful­ly to the mem­bers of the In­de­pen­dent bench that what would hap­pen is a pletho­ra of cas­es be­ing dis­missed,” she said.

“Po­lice of­fi­cers are in­ca­pable or un­able to sat­is­fy the statu­to­ry bur­dens that the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al wish­es to place up­on them through this piece of leg­is­la­tion,” she said.

Ramb­ha­jan said that the amend­ments were “ex­act repli­cas” of the Eng­lish leg­is­la­tion.

“The dif­fer­ence be­tween Eng­land and T&T is that we do not have the re­sources that they do,” Ramb­ha­jan said.

“If you are giv­ing them leg­isla­tive du­ties, you have to equal­ly give them re­sources and I sup­port my col­league, Sen­a­tor (Jayan­ti) Lutch­me­di­al, who said that there was a bud­getary cut, so how are do­ing the two things?” she asked.

“So you want the po­lice do some­thing, but you not giv­ing them noth­ing to do it with,” she said.

Ramb­ha­jan said she ex­pect­ed to be chal­lenged on that mat­ter and pre­empt­ed by fur­ther ex­pla­na­tion.

“The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al would say we’ve pro­vid­ed the plant, the ma­chin­ery, the tools and the peo­ple. Where is it? I am not see­ing it, with the great­est of re­spect, “she said.

Ramb­ha­jan said that as well-in­ten­tioned as the amend­ments are, with­out the prac­ti­cal ca­pa­bil­i­ties for im­ple­men­ta­tion, it is all mere­ly “words on pa­per”.

“That is all it is. And when you are deal­ing with the fun­da­men­tal rights and free­doms of the peo­ple of T&T, you can­not just re­duce it to words on pa­per,” she said.

She paint­ed a sce­nario of a man ar­rest­ed at 2 am and tak­en to the sta­tion with­out a war­rant and when he asked for his right to a phone call is told to use his mo­bile.

“That is a re­al­i­ty,” she said.

“Would the po­lice have the rel­e­vant train­ing, knowl­edge and ca­pa­bil­i­ty to do that which they want to do through this leg­is­la­tion? I say to you they would not,” she added.

She said that some­thing as sim­ple as sta­tion di­aries are of­ten un­avail­able as po­lice of­fi­cers say that they use their pri­vate di­aries for work pur­pos­es.

She said that while the Gov­ern­ment’s at­tempt to fix the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem was “well-in­ten­tioned”, they need­ed to bet­ter un­der­stand it first.