tidings
Reginald Armor –
Attorney General (AG) Reginald Armor has announced that 20 new lawyers have been appointed to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), in an effort to address staffing and space concerns.
He made the announcement in a one-on-one interview on TTT’s Delving Deeper show on Sunday.
Armor said that when he was appointed AG, one of his first priorities was to engage the DPP and talk to him about the challenges his office was facing. Armor said some of the main issues and challenges he was aware of were staffing and space.
“The current situation is that the DPP has been understaffed,” he said. “There are other challenges that I know the DPSH has that have to do with the judiciary, because they have built a very aggressive judicial process that requires DPSH lawyers to be in two countries at the same time.
“One morning you are dealing with case management and the same day you are dealing with trials and there were not enough lawyers in the DPA department for two different lawyers to deal with two different things at the same time. . So I know it’s a challenge. It was brought to my attention by the DPSH and it is something I talked about with the President of the Court”.
“This has been improved by 20 lawyers. Now, with the additional lawyers, I expect that will build on the settlement.”
He described the young lawyers as “young, enthusiastic and hardworking”.
Young lawyers, he said, came out of the Hugh Wooding Law School.
Armor said space issues are also being addressed through the opening of new offices in Park Street, Port of Spain. In 2020, the National Infrastructure Development Company (NIDCO) handed over the ceremonial keys to the $24 million six-storey office to the DPP. The building has floors dedicated to the executive secretariat of the DPP, administrative and support units, processing units and units for the use of the indictment and safe.
New Anti-Terror Legislation to Bring ISIS Refugees Home
Armor also said the AG’s office was working on the bill that would provide a gateway for women and children who were sent to Syria by Trinidadians who left to join the extremist group ISIS but have since died, according to so that they can return home and reintegrate safely into TT society.
“One of the things we’re looking to do in the last amendment we’re discussing at this point, and we’re in active consultation with the law reform commission, is to provide legislation that will try to find a gateway to bring those people back. .
See also
“But to bring them back in a way that can be sensitive to the fact that they’re going to need help, and sensitive to the fact that they’re going to have to be properly assessed as to whether they’re going to represent a safety or health risk and placed in an environment that will allow them to transition back to TT,” Armor said.
Between 2013 and 2016, at least 130 people from TT, including women and children, left for Syria after the men in the family left to join the caliphate as mercenary fighters loyal to IS. They are now believed to be dead.
Since 2017, families in TT of women and children have been calling on the government to find a way to return them home. A repatriation, rehabilitation and reintegration project was started to show the government that it could be done safely.
In 2018, the then national security minister, Stuart Young, set up a multi-disciplinary, multi-agency team to deal with the potential repatriation of those in Syria and Iraq.
The team included members of the Financial Intelligence Unit, the TTPS Terrorist Interdiction Unit, the Child Protection Unit and the Counter-Terrorism Desk of the Ministry of Public Prosecutions and Legal Affairs.
ISIS fell in 2019.
