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This evening, the government announced that it has (finally) established the Emergency Powers Review Tribunal. That is the body which the constitution decrees must be set up after detainees are held for anything more than a month under the state of emergency.
The Tribunal is chaired by attorney Jose Alpuche,and has membership of two Former Commissioners of Police, Gerald Westby and Carmen Zetina.
The Tribunal will review cases of persons detained under the Belize Constitution (Emergency Powers) Regulations.
We today asked the police minister about his government's practice of prioritizing suppression policing:
Jules Vasquez:
"You all continue to invest in suppression or, give lip service only to community policing. Do you see this changing?"
Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs
"Absolutely. Jules. that is, a highly unfair comment. If you were to use your own archives and do a little, some of your own history, from Channel Seven news, you will see that over the last three years, we have the least amount of complaints of oppression and suppression, in the history of that at least in the last 10 or 20 years."
Jules Vasquez:
"Unu just send wah 13 year old to jail, under SOE without seeing a judge!"
Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs
"As you know, Jules, the young man, and I don't like to talk about him in that light - but you clearly do - that young man committed an offense for which he was later charged. And so we have to be law-abiding citizens, and we have to encourage our parents, to raise our children, to be law-abiding citizens."
"At the end of the day, we cannot tolerate lawlessness. So whether you're 13, whether you're 15, whether you're 40, age doesn't really matter. But we have to ensure that we play a pivotal role in that young man's life moving forward so that he does not end up in prison."
Jules Vasquez:
"There are other ways to make interventions rather than locking up someone for 90 days without seeing a judge."
"I'm saying that how can a state that has implemented a 90 day state of emergency, how can it say that it's doing anything in the area of community policing when really it's showing that it's a suppressor in chief?"
Kareem Musa, Minister of Home Affairs
"Yeah, I don't know if you've heard of the unit called the Leadership Intervention Unit. Jules, but that unit was designed by our ministry for exactly that to intervene in a positive way in the lives, lives of our young men, particularly on the south side of Belize City. And it has had immense success. Yes. we will have a few young men falling through the cracks. But at the end of the day, that is a long term strategy. It's not an overnight fix."
"We're talking about decades and decades of abandoning these young men, neglecting these young men. and they're feeling a sense of hopelessness. And so the LIU was created to try to change that path."
