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In the recent past, governments both of the United National Congress (UNC) and of the Peoples National Movement (PNM) have had the then president of the Republic proclaim states of emergency said to be directed at the level of violent criminal activity.
The dates of the proclamations were respectively 21 August 2011 and 30 December 2024 (before the PNM’s electoral defeat on 28 April 2025).
Photo: TTPS.
Neither of these states of emergency were kept in place for a duration longer than the initial period of 15 days plus the first of the extensions not exceeding three months, which can be authorised by a mere simple majority vote in the House of Representatives.
It is important to note that after extensions obtainable by a simple majority vote in the House of Representatives that do not aggregate to more than six months, additional extensions for not more than three months at any one time require a special majority vote of not less than three-fifths of both of the Houses of Parliament.
That is why last week I linked the importance of the role of independent senators to states of emergency.
Photo: Office of the Parliament 2025.
Repeated or prolonged states of emergency are likely to be used to normalise erosion of democracy. The need for votes in the Senate are an important check and balance.
Despite those two uses of emergency powers in 2011 (with a curfew) and 2024 into 2025, there was no lasting relief from violent crime. The fear of citizens grew and continues, particularly with respect to home invasions. The violent crime issue was a contributor to the recent defeat of the PNM.
While the newly returned UNC Government must have an opportunity to fulfill its campaign intimations that it can and will deal with the problem, violent crime and home invasions persist and incidents of kidnapping are re-occurring. It is crunch time.
(via UNC.)
The UNC government’s credibility, however, received a serious blow when its Minister of Homeland Security, Roger Alexander, made a statement deflecting the Government’s responsibility for violent crime similar to the utterances of his PNM predecessor, Minister of National Security Fitzgerald Hinds.
(See for further reference the Trinidad Express newspaper’s incisive editorial on 13 July, entitled Crime Evasion.)
Many citizens recognise that the implementation of a state of emergency without other lasting measures is not a crime fighting tool. Most murder is carried out with impunity, given the disastrously low detection rate.
Our country, in the pungent words of a close friend, is “the get-away place”. A state of emergency cannot fix that.
Despite the negligible outcomes of the two previous states of emergency, which, arguably, have discredited use of emergency powers, we now have another state of emergency in place. It was declared a week ago on 18 July.
Although no statement providing the reason in one coherent form initially accompanied the current declaration, the Attorney General, John Jeremie SC, dropped sufficient references at a media briefing from which we can infer that this state of emergency is a result of threatened coordinated gang action against the state and public officials stimulated from inside the country’s prisons.
Photo: Office of the Parliament 2025.
The Attorney General even made a statement to the effect that there would not be another attempted coup like 1990 on his watch.
Tomorrow, the House of Representatives begins the mandatory debate on the proclamation of the state of emergency, required by the Constitution to be held not later than 15 days from the date of the proclamation.
As may become necessary, I will examine this debate in Parliament. We can however expect the usual expressions of the mutual hatred between the Government and the Opposition, which may eventually leave the country to be completely torn apart by the gangs whose paramountcy has been effectively acknowledged in the run-up to the debate.
Photo: OPM.
Sadly, in these columns, by reference to the writings of Professor HLA Hart, a renowned former Professor of Jurisprudence of Oxford University, I have warned repeatedly that the criminal elements have already carried out a form of coup d’etat that leaves them in effective control of many areas of the country while our elected governments ineffectively control the levers of constitutional power.
You see why it is crunch time?
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Martin G Daly SC is a prominent attorney-at-law. He is a former Independent Senator and past president of the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago.
He is chairman of the Pat Bishop Foundation and a steelpan music enthusiast.
