Going back to Minister Usher now, he also discussed government's flip-flopping on the independent investigation into the abduction of Joseph Budna. As we have reported, government sheepishly announced last week that there was no available legal avenue to set up an independent investigation - so the case file was just going to the DPP - as any normal investigation would. Usher explained the justification:
Henry Charles Usher, Minister of Public Service, Governance, and Disaster Risk Management
"Well the DPP is an independent body constitutionally, and they are the ones responsible for looking to see if any charges should be filed in terms of any incident that happens. So I think, yes, the media has to understand that the DPP is the body that would have ultimately gotten this report, been able to file charges if the DPP feels that charges should be filed. You have to remember too that I think there is a misunderstanding in terms of independent investigation, we do not have that in our laws. It is not like we can appoint some independent prosecutor to look at this, that is not what is in our laws and we have had discussions at the cabinet level to look to see if we want to move towards something similar to what Jamaica recently did in terms of implementing an agency that would be able to carry out a type of independent investigation. But I think a lot of times we see what happens in other countries especially in the US and we think that it can happen here as well. Right now the police are legislated to carry out investigations. You can also have the ombudsman carrying out limited investigations and if the prime minister appoints a mission of inquiry or if the senate has a senate special select inquiry those are the types of investigations that can happen. Now whether you wanted to say that another set of eyes should have looked at the same report. well that is what the DPP is doing right now, her office is responsible for looking at this report and determining if further investigations are needed and determining if any charges can be filed based on the report so that is where we are right now with that."
