By Vernon Daley, Staff ReporterLOCAL AND international human rights groups continue to direct biting criticism at the Government's human rights record.
Assessing the performance of the P.J. Patterson-led administration since it retook office 100 days ago, the groups point squarely to what they say is the Government's failure to punish state agents who abuse citizens rights.
Attorney-General A.J. Nicholson, however, argues that the Government has undertaken a number of initiatives over the past three months which will improve the quality of justice and bolster the rights of Jamaicans.
Executive director of Jamaicans for Justice, Dr. Carolyn Gomes, gave the Government a favourable rating for continuing its periodic consultations with human rights groups to arrive at ways to improve the country's human rights situation.
She, however, pointed to major areas of concerns such as proposed legislation to give police powers to soldiers; a continuing high rate of police killings; and the slow pace of disciplining wayward state agents who abuse citizens rights.
"We are very concerned about the attempt to give soldiers police powers, because from a human rights perspective that can't be a good thing," Dr. Gomes said.
The legislation to give soldiers such powers is now before a Joint Select Committee of Parliament and has been subjected to criticism from the human rights groups and the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), which argue that soldiers do not have the training to handle the powers being contemplated.
But, perhaps the major concern of the human rights lobby group is the continuing high number of police killings. In 2002, there were 133 police killings and 140 the year before. Also, between the end of October last year and the present, some 27 people have been killed by the police.
"In the three years we have been collecting cases, only one policeman has been charged and that case hasn't even started in the Supreme Court," Dr. Gomes said. "That's unacceptable. That pace of justice is completely unacceptable."
Despite the concerns, the Attorney-General said there is ground for "cautious optimism" given the steps that have been taken to improve the justice system and promote human rights since the last election.
He pointed to reforms in the court system to reduce the backlog of cases and speed up citizens access to justice. These, he said, included a recent revision of rules governing the courts and the introduction of mediation as a permanent fixture of the court system.
The Attorney-General also pointed to continuing renovation of dilapidated courthouses across the island as a clear move the improve justice available to citizens.
With respect to police killings, Senator Nicholson argued that the problem could only be dealt with when there is a better relationship between the police and the community.
"When you are going to get the police killings significantly reduced is when you have this co-operation between citizens and the police, which would cause less confrontation. It is confrontation that is causing these police killings," he insisted.
Part of the strategy being used to bridge this gap, the Attorney-General said, is to have lawyers in the Force brief police officers on how they should act when they go out on policing operations.
But international human rights watchdog group, Amnesty International, is not overly impressed by the efforts of the Government to deal with human rights abuses since it was re-elected.
"Whilst there have been some encouraging steps - for example, closer involvement of community and human rights groups to develop policing policies the most central element that is still missing is the political will needed to hold state agents who commit violations to account and to start dismantling the culture of impunity," said Olivia Streater, Amnesty's researcher of the Caribbean and North America Team.
She added that there have been some retrograde steps such as the move to reintroduce hanging.
Recently, Cabinet instructed the Chief Parliamentary Counsel to prepare legislation related to the resumption of hanging. Such legislation would make it possible to bypass recent rulings of the United Kingdom-based Privy Council, which the Government claimed had prevented the death penalty from being carried out.
Senator Nicholson said the death penalty was currently on the books and the Government had a duty to carry it out. He said, however, that there will come a time when the death penalty will have to be re-examined but argued that such a time was not now.
