In a landmark legislative move on Tuesday, the House of Representatives of Antigua and Barbuda has passed the Magistrate’s Court (Amendment) Bill 2026, a set of revisions to the country’s decades-old Magistrate’s Court Act that dramatically broaden the scope of search warrant access and execution for national law enforcement agencies.
The push for reform grew out of widespread cross-party consensus that existing statutory language had grown outdated, creating unnecessary barriers that hindered police efforts to probe and curtail criminal activity across the islands. Attorney General Steadroy Benjamin, the lead sponsor of the bill, emphasized that the core goal of the adjustments is to bring investigative protocols in line with 21st-century criminal trends, granting law enforcement much-needed flexibility to gather critical evidence during active probes.
Three major changes mark the most significant departures from the original legislation. First, the revised act lifts longstanding restrictions that limited search warrant issuance to only specific categories of criminal offences, now allowing warrants to be approved for any illegal act under national law. Second, the reforms for the first time permit law enforcement to execute search warrants on Sundays, a change that government legislators framed as critical to stopping suspects from exploiting weekend gaps to destroy evidence or evade detection by authorities. Third, the new rules allow investigators to legally seize any evidence of criminal activity uncovered during a warranted search, even if that specific material was not explicitly listed in the original warrant application, so long as the evidence connects to a committed offence.
Government supporters of the bill argued that modern criminal networks have systematically exploited outdated procedural loopholes to avoid accountability, and that updating investigative powers is a necessary step to strengthen public safety and speed up the pace of criminal probes. While opposition lawmakers ultimately backed the legislation, they raised targeted concerns about maintaining robust checks on the expanded powers, stressing that judicial oversight and constitutional protections for citizens must remain fully intact to prevent potential abuse.
In response to these concerns, Benjamin confirmed that the amendments retain the non-negotiable requirement of judicial pre-authorization for all search warrants, with magistrates retaining full authority to approve or deny applications based on established legal standards. The search warrant reform was one piece of a broader slate of legislative updates put before Parliament during the sitting, which also included votes on the Fatal Accidents Bill, Electronic Crimes Amendment Bill, and Immigration and Passport Amendment Bill.
Once the bill receives formal executive assent and is published in the official government gazette, the amendments will go into effect, granting all authorized law enforcement agencies across Antigua and Barbuda their expanded search authorities immediately.