AG: Whistleblower, evidence, cybercrime bills soon

A package of supporting legislation for the Civil Asset Recovery and Management and Unexplained Wealth Bill 2019 will soon be brought to Parliament.

Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi said the package would include the Whistleblower Protection Bill, aimed at combating corruption, almost four years after the Prime Minister first laid it in Parliament.

Al-Rawi said it had been on the order paper for a little while and would be dealt with as soon as the Government was finished with the current batch of legislation before the Parliament and Senate.

“We will just have to prioritise how we are going to deal with that,” Al-Rawi said in an interview with the media in San Fernando on Wednesday night.

He said unlike the Unexplained Wealth Bill, which required a simple majority, the Whistleblower Bill would require a three-fifths majority vote.

He said he would not venture to presume how the opposition United National Congress (UNC), which surprisingly voted in favour of the Unexplained Wealth Bill after several amendments, would vote on the Whistleblower Bill.

“We will just have to wait and see. It is up to them to decide on where they stand on the legislation.” Al-Rawi said the Evidence Bill was another critical piece of legislation which allowed for witness anonymity to support the Wealth Bill. He said under that legislation, evidence would be given very carefully only with judicial scrutiny, as was being done for child victims. “A child who is a victim of rape has the ability to be put behind a screen or have the child’s voice modulated, so anonymous witness evidence is not something that is unusual.

“We are talking about this kind of evidence for several matters, for example, murder. Far too often we have crimes that are committed, but nobody is willing to step forward and speak about it for genuine fear. So providing an environment for that to work with judicial scrutiny is the key.”

Al-Rawi also said the Government might have found the balance that has been a sticking point with the Media Association of TT (MATT) in the cybercrime legislation. “The media association wants complete exemption for journalists.

The problem is, who is a journalist? Anybody who holds a microphone? Anybody who writes on the Internet? Who should be given a blanket exemption from cybercrime?” Cybercrime, he said, “is about hacking and using hacked information, cyberbullying.

It is a serious offence. “The question is, how do you find that balance for the media? We think we have found a formula for that, and in the Cybercrime Joint Select Committee, which we are treating with, we will hopefully advance that for consideration,” particularly by members of MATT, he said.