Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, has called for the creation of a CARICOM arrest warrant, among other key tactics, in order to arrest crime across the region.
Speaking Monday at the launch of the 2-day Regional Symposium on Crime at the Hyatt Regency, Port of Spain, Mottley called for concrete recommendations to be adopted at the end the symposium.
She said: “I really believe we would do ourselves an injustice, if the delegates left here without adopting decisions to be implemented across the region.
“We need the CARICOM arrest warrant, we need to have the exchange and rotation of judges…we need to have an enlargement of the jurisdiction of magistrates, we need cooperation on forensics and we need to….deconstruct all the rules in our police service and reconstruct them,” Mottley told a panel discussion of regional leaders.
A former attorney turned PM, Mottley noted that many years ago “people did not get bail for murder.
“Now when I look at the stats, not just out of the Bahamas, Barbados and all through the region, the people who are causing the greatest problems are charged with two, three, four murders. Something is fundamentally wrong.
“So I ask myself two basic questions. How are we going to deconstruct and reconstruct to meet the reality of this jurisprudential development that is undermining the rule of law in our countries and we are going to have to find ways of cooperating from the level of the police to the level of the courts, but in particular, forensics.
“If we can get people to court within nine to 12 months, you have a good chance of a person not being given bail. Beyond 12 months, any number can start to play,” Mottley said, questioning why countries have been establishing forensic labs individually.
She also questioned why the region is not involved in “proactive prosecutions rather than reactive prosecutions,” noting that 90 per cent of the prosecutions in the Caribbean are as a result of a crime perceived of having being committed as opposed “to people systemically going after people in a structured way”.
Mottley said regional countries having agreed that security would be the new pillar for the socio-economic development of the region over the last 20 years “we have not followed through on the functional day to day cooperation that can make the difference there.
In her contribution, Mottley agreed with sentiments that the United States had “no moral authority” to speak out on gun-related violence.
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