Source: Loop Caribbean
Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines is defending the labeling of crime as a public health issue.
Speaking at the opening of the second day of the Regional Symposium: Violence as a Public Health Issue – The CARICOM Challenge, Gonsalves said other leaders made it clear that crime is a multifaceted matter requiring a total society approach but at this time the public health dimension is being highlighted.
“So to the extent that anyone conceives that there any tension between the public health approach and the command and control approach, for instance, there is nothing wrong if there are tensions. The question is this, how does one resolve those tensions?
“In any given situation there are inherent contradictions and tensions, there are not either/or. Indeed, if anyone maturely bridges questions under consideration in either/or terms, one misses the subtleties and the dialectical nature in the way one analyses and fashions solutions,” he said.
“Those who may do so for a partisan political purpose, or for some other allied malignancy, I can’t answer that, I can only speak in a broad conceptual way maturely about a problem which confronts us,” he said.
Gonsalves’ comments came on the heels of criticism from Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Trinidad and Tobago Opposition Leader, of crime being labeled a public health matter.
Persad-Bissessar told reporters at the opening of the conference that crime is not a public health issue, but she agrees it causes public health issues.
Gonsalves stressed that crime includes all of society and called for a reconfiguration and re-engineering of the family, church, media, communities, business, and the state.
“And then we have to look at the region and the various nation-states within the Caribbean community, the kind of union we have been involved in on the issue of crime has not been the best,” he said, stating that the issue of security came fairly late to the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas.
He said it was Trinidad and Tobago that insisted there be a third pillar and that it should be security.
Gonsalves pointed out, however, that while we work on everything he mentioned, the act of crime is a choice for those who carry it out.
“It is not so much that they devalue life. If they devalue life and they are frustrated and they can’t get on in this world they would commit suicide rather than homicide. The fact that they commit homicide is a step we have to grasp and understand,” he said.
Gonsalves said in many communities there is a sense of social solidarity and asked how we can scale that up to a national level.
“To do that we have to look at a redefinition of the relationships between all those various sectors and actors I spoke about and have social solidarity at its core,” he said, reiterating that dog-eat-dog capitalism is undermining that solidarity.
Gonsalves also had some words for the judiciary as he urged judges to control their courts.
He said the criminal justice system is increasingly being controlled by lawyers who practice criminal law.
“We all know the oxygen of the legal professions is money and lawyers use delays in the court system in order to have trials adjourned and they complain about how long the trial takes. Sometimes it may be the absence of resources and I am not denying that but too many judges have allowed too many lawyers who practice criminal law to control the court system under the guise of protecting the rights of the accused person who in fact is entitled constitutionally to the presumption of innocence, to a fair trial before an independent tribunal in a reasonable time,” he said.
“And nobody would want to undermine any of those constitutional protections but those protections cannot and do not mean that you must take a long time over a trial and give adjournments upon adjournments and witnesses migrate and memories fade and a lot of times you have to withdraw the prosecution because delay is part of the defense and judges ought to know that.”