WITH close to five years now gone since the Prevention of Corruption Act was passed in Parliament and assented to by the Governor General, an Opposition Member of Parliament is telling the Democratic Labour Party Government that it would be pointless to proclaim the Act now on the eve of a general election.
Shadow Attorney General and Member of Parliament (MP) for St. Joseph, Dale Marshall, made the point as he suggested that the Government perhaps was never serious about getting the legislation on the statute books. He was speaking yesterday to journalists attending a media conference at the Opposition Leader’s Office in Parliament.
“We had an election and the matter of integrity legislation has been all but forgotten by the current government. Having not proclaimed it up to this point, we, meaning the Barbados Labour Party and of course all of Barbados, are left with no option but to conclude that the Government was not serious about having modern integrity legislation in Barbados and that in truth and in fact, passing it in Parliament was nothing more than another exercise in checking the box,” Marshall told journalists.
The Shadow Attorney General added, “We believe that the Dems wanted to be able to boast that they put this Act on the statute books, but the fact is that they never had any intention of making it operative.”
He bolstered that point, noting that no money had been earmarked in any of the Estimates of Revenue and Expenditure in the years following the passage of that Act, to make the proposed Integrity Commission the Act spoke to, operational. While not pleased the Act has not been proclaimed, Marshall, a former attorney general, said it is probably a good thing that it is still not the official law, as the piece of legislation is “wholly inadequate to fight corruption and to preserve integrity in public life” in this country. He further argued that it is “woefully deficient” in important areas, and therefore, he maintained it cannot usefully serve to maintain integrity in public life in the current circumstances.
Marshall’s comments came as he announced that the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) has created a draft Integrity Commission Bill, which they would seek to have enacted once they regain the reins of power.
“The commission that was created in the 2012 Act is a fairly helpless and toothless creature and it is hamstrung by the very instrument that created it. We have therefore set out to draft a new bill which is largely complete,” he said.
He explained that under the 2012 Act, the commission can only conduct an inquiry and does not have any enforcement mechanism or investigative powers. But those deficiencies, he maintained, will be addressed in the BLP’s draft bill, which gives the commission the right to investigate and gather evidence and to employ investigative officers who will have their powers enshrined in law. This, he said, would allow the commission to engage in a kind of “policing activity” rather than waiting for reports to be made to it as is the case under the 2012 Act. (JRT)