Against a backdrop of rising violent crime and sustained reliance on emergency governance across the Caribbean, a leading criminologist has echoed the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) warning that repeated use of states of emergency requires careful balancing of public safety imperatives and constitutionally enshrined civil liberties.
In an interview with the *Express* published Saturday, criminologist Akinee Harry broke down the core argument laid out in the IACHR’s 2025 annual report, which flags the growing use of prolonged states of emergency across three Caribbean nations — Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, and Jamaica — as a growing threat to fundamental human rights. The regional human rights body specifically raised alarms about eroded protections for freedom of expression, freedom of association, and personal liberty linked to the ongoing deployment of these extraordinary measures.
Harry emphasized that democratic governments carry two non-negotiable, complementary responsibilities, not competing priorities: shielding their populations from the harm of violent crime, and upholding the civil rights guaranteed to all citizens under national law. “The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights raises an important principle,” Harry noted. “Every democratic state has both a duty to protect its citizens from violent crime and an equally important duty to safeguard constitutional rights. These responsibilities should not be viewed as competing objectives.”
He acknowledged the severe security pressures facing the three countries named in the report, noting all three grapple with well-entrenched transnational organized criminal networks, rampant illicit firearms trafficking, and persistently high homicide rates that threaten public stability. Under international and domestic law, Harry confirmed, governments are fully within their rights to declare a state of emergency when a clear, pressing threat meets the legal threshold for extraordinary action. But he aligned with the IACHR’s core position that emergency powers must remain just that — exceptional tools to address temporary crises, not routine fixtures of daily governance.
Crucially, Harry argued that small island developing states (SIDS) like those in the Caribbean cannot build long-term public safety on repeated cycles of emergency declaration. Lasting reductions in violent crime, he explained, require systemic upgrades across the entire criminal justice ecosystem: more robust community policing, enhanced intelligence gathering capabilities, streamlined and effective prosecution processes, and improved rates of conviction for violent offenders. Beyond institutional criminal justice reform, he called for targeted, sustained investment in evidence-based violence prevention programs that address the root social and economic conditions that push people toward criminal activity.
“Without broader institutional reforms, criminal organisations often adjust their methods once emergency measures come to an end,” Harry explained, noting that temporary crackdowns rarely produce lasting reductions in criminal activity if underlying systemic weaknesses remain unaddressed.
For Harry, the central policy debate is not whether states of emergency should ever be used, but how they are structured and overseen. Any deployment of extraordinary emergency powers, he stressed, must remain lawful, proportionate to the threat at hand, and fully transparent to the public. These measures must also be subject to robust checks and balances from both parliamentary oversight bodies and the judiciary, to prevent abuse of power.
He also urged governments to outline clear, measurable performance benchmarks when declaring a state of emergency, to rigorously assess whether the measures are actually delivering sustained improvements to public safety. Without these guardrails, emergency powers can slowly erode the democratic foundations that states are meant to protect, he argued.
Ultimately, Harry framed the IACHR’s intervention as a constructive call to action rather than an attack on Caribbean governments’ efforts to curb crime. The commission’s concerns, he said, should be seen as an invitation to strengthen democratic accountability, and to explore evidence-based alternative approaches to tackling violent crime that do not rely on repeated states of emergency.