Trinidad: Rowley not ready to act on LATT report

(Trinidad Guardian) Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said he will not be rushed to de­cide on the Law Asso­ci­a­tion’s re­port on Chief Jus­tice Ivor Archie.

This was made clear by Row­ley to me­dia yesterday when asked if he had a re­sponse to the re­port sent by LATT last Thurs­day.

“I have no com­ment to make on that is­sue. When I have a com­ment to make I’ll let you know. As soon as I have some­thing to say on the is­sue, I would let you know,” Row­ley said.

His re­sponse came dur­ing his an­nu­al Christ­mas chil­dren’s cel­e­bra­tion held at the South Diego Mar­tin Recre­ation Grounds at Four Roads, Diego Mar­tin.

The re­port, which re­lates to al­le­ga­tions of mis­con­duct against Archie, is now be­fore Row­ley for him to de­cide whether there is suf­fi­cient ev­i­dence to trig­ger Sec­tion 137 of the Con­sti­tu­tion — im­peach­ment pro­ceed­ings to re­move Archie from of­fice.

On De­cem­ber 10, 150 LATT mem­bers vot­ed to send the re­port to the PM while 32 vot­ed against.

Though he avoid­ed the CJ is­sue, Row­ley shared his per­son­al Christ­mas and New Year wish­es for T&T.

When asked of his Christ­mas wish, he re­spond­ed, “That we im­prove our safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty and the secu­ri­ty ser­vices bring a sense of com­fort. We look for­ward to achiev­ing an econ­o­my that can sat­is­fy the needs of our peo­ple and we’re look­ing for­ward to those im­prove­ments in 2019.”

Re­gard­ing the New Year, he added, “There are a num­ber of is­sues on the eco­nom­ic front that we’re work­ing on.”

He said mur­der toll, which has crossed 500 for the year, was an in­tractable prob­lem, which his Government was very dis­ap­point­ed about, be­cause of the “will­ing­ness with which el­e­ments of the society seem to see killing as the source and so­lu­tion to their prob­lem.”

“As you would have seen the se­cu­ri­ty ser­vices have been very ac­tive and have had much more suc­cess than in re­cent times, yet the avail­abil­i­ty of firearms to com­mit vi­o­lent crimes, still re­mains a prob­lem,” Row­ley said.

He said one has to won­der what the sit­u­a­tion would have been if “we hadn’t had the suc­cess­es, which we have had.”

“Mur­ders are large­ly be­cause of the avail­abil­i­ty to some peo­ple of firearms, who seem to think that they could com­mit these of­fences and not be de­tect­ed,” Row­ley said.

He con­tin­ued, “We are work­ing on im­prov­ing our de­tec­tion and in bring­ing peo­ple to jus­tice. But more im­por­tant­ly, we have too many peo­ple in this coun­try who be­lieve that vi­o­lence is an ac­cept­able way of life. Even when they don’t use firearms, it is oth­er as­pects of tak­ing life.”

Row­ley said T&T was just a vi­o­lent so­ci­ety and the con­ver­sa­tion from the homes to the schools, to the church­es, to the streets, must fo­cus on tak­ing down the view, that vi­o­lence is an ac­cept­able way of life.