Three high-profile defendants – murder-accused Rajaee Ali, Earl Richards, and Canadian vlogger Christopher “Chris Must List” Hughes – have asked Trinidad and Tobago’s Police Service Commission (PolSC) to rule whether the national Commissioner of Police must step back from any probe or review into alleged violations of the country’s intelligence gathering and communications interception laws.
In a formal July 16 letter addressed to PolSC chair Dr Wendell Wallace and Director of Public Prosecutions Roger Gaspard, SC, attorneys Criston J Williams and Blaine Sobrian of Quantum Legal are also pushing for the creation of an independent oversight body to examine compliance with mandatory reporting rules laid out in two key pieces of legislation: the Strategic Services Agency (SSA) Act and the Interception of Communications Act. Copies of the correspondence have also been circulated to Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar and Police Complaints Authority director David West, with the legal team requesting a confirmation of receipt within 72 hours and a formal substantive response by noon on July 27.
The attorneys emphasize that their clients have been directly harmed by official actions that relied on intelligence and national security data collected by state agencies exercising covert statutory powers. In the case of Ali and Richards, public authorities publicly cited intelligence to justify moving the pair from the Maximum Security Prison to Teteron Barracks during a recent national state of emergency, followed by the issuance of formal Preventive Detention Orders. For Hughes, national security concerns, claims of links to organized criminal activity, and alleged communications with specific individuals were publicly used as evidence during ongoing criminal proceedings against the Canadian content creator.
Importantly, the legal team stresses this action is not a challenge to legitimate intelligence gathering or intelligence-led policing, nor does it claim that any communications interception involving the three clients was inherently unlawful. Instead, the core of their complaint centers on whether state bodies granted these sweeping covert powers have followed the statutory safeguards put in place by Parliament, and whether the accountability mechanisms designed to oversee these powers have been allowed to fall into disuse without public explanation.
The letter highlights a critical gap in oversight: the annual reports required under Section 13 of the SSA Act and Section 24 of the Interception of Communications Act have not been tabled before Parliament for multiple consecutive years. Since the start of 2024, the legal team has sent multiple inquiries to a range of senior public officials, including former national security ministers, the current Minister of Homeland Security, the Minister of Defence, the Clerk of the House of Representatives, and the Speaker of the House. While responses confirmed that at least one annual report was prepared and delivered to the responsible national security minister, none were ever presented to the full Parliament for scrutiny.
These mandatory reporting requirements are not procedural formalities, the attorneys argue: they are core statutory safeguards designed to enforce ministerial accountability and guarantee parliamentary oversight of intelligence gathering and covert surveillance powers. The letter also raises new questions around public spending on the SSA, noting that combined actual spending, reported expenditure, and budget allocations linked to the agency between 1995 and 2026 total at least $3.079 billion. Yet there is no consolidated, independently audited, publicly accessible account of the SSA’s full spending history, leaving Parliament without sufficient information to properly oversee the agency’s activities and budget.
The legal team points to 2024 comments by former prime minister Dr Keith Rowley, who publicly acknowledged an ongoing audit of the SSA that uncovered serious problems with the agency’s structure, staffing, weapons and ammunition inventory, and internal governance. These previously disclosed issues, the attorneys argue, only underscore the urgent need for robust statutory reporting and independent parliamentary oversight.
The letter notes that the Office of the Commissioner of Police is a formal part of the statutory framework governing communications interception and intelligence gathering. As such, common law principles around apparent bias and institutional independence require that the commissioner step aside when questions about compliance with this framework arise. The attorneys stress that they are making no allegations of misconduct or bad faith against the current commissioner. Even so, they argue that the commissioner should not take part in any investigation, review, assessment, or decision-making related to the alleged statutory non-compliance laid out in the letter. An independent review is necessary to protect public trust in the accountability framework established by Parliament, they maintain.
Beyond recusal, the legal team is asking the PolSC to consider approving the creation of an independent review panel made up of qualified, institutionally independent experts. This panel would be tasked with three core responsibilities: determining whether the mandatory reporting obligations under both the SSA Act and Interception of Communications Act have been met, assessing whether institutional or legislative reforms are needed to fix gaps in oversight, and identifying what additional safeguards can be introduced to rebuild public confidence in the national statutory accountability framework for intelligence operations.