Tag Archives: human rights

“[…] The [Appeal] Court ruled that, despite modern thinking and growing public support for human rights, parts of our Constitution still protect colonial laws. The judges admitted their limitations: they don’t make the laws, they interpret them. The real work, they said, is for Parliament. “That ruling […] was a …

“[…] The (rescue) divers were geared up and were ready, only to be prevented on Paria’s instructions, by Paria’s armed private police and the armed Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard. “[…] Paria had evidence that four human beings were alive, asking for help, suffering in a confined space and Paria …

Covid-19 brought an exhausting string of events. First, we had to wash our hands, and then we had to wear masks, social distance from all, then lockdown.  To be vaccinated or not. Fear populated our every moment as we realised how little control we had over our lives. The feeling …

There’s a human who walks in small tight circles on the pavement in Champs Fleurs in front of a successful company. His fingers on one hand are visibly rotting, his smell is putrid, he made me think of the personification of the ‘creature from the black lagoon’. I first saw …

“Human rights are non-negotiable and prisoners who may be paedophiles are not excluded. That is the law—even when we don’t like the results. “[…] The implication of [Dr Varma Deyalsingh’s] statement is that the paedophile prison population is the cause of overcrowding and so chemical castration is proffered as the …

The Government of Trinidad and Tobago (GTT) behaves as if human rights are an annoyance. Two clear examples are the issue of rights of refugees and the LGBT community’s right to be treated equally under the Equal Opportunity Act 2000 (EOA). Oh, lest I forget, the EOA’s section 3 (interpretation) …

“What we often fail to realise is that human rights are not a zero-sum game and recognising rights on the left does not remove rights on the right. “Recognising the human rights of former slaves to be free did not diminish the human rights of the former colonials to freedom. …

The rule of law is an abstract concept but that does not mean it is difficult to understand. Here goes: Let us suppose the government passed a law to empower the police to come into your house and take all your money away and freeze all your bank accounts? How …

“There are currently—and this is a figure that comes from the HDC itself—180,000 applicants on the HDC’s books, which is just about 12% of the entire population. That is no surprise. “The surprise is that, despite the length of the waiting list, there are several developments all across the country …

“The more recent understanding of rights is that they also involve what we call economic, social and cultural rights; namely, the rights to education, to health, to work, the environment and to culture. “Significantly, we have moved away from the self-imposed limitation that economic, social and cultural rights are merely …