Enforcing Environmental Laws In Barbados – Forget The Police, We Need Specialists

According to the Minister of Energy and the Environment Elizabeth Thompson, the Cabinet recently approved “a comprehensive Environmental Management Act for Barbados”. (Barbados Advocate article link here.)
While we are pleased to see the Government finally taking steps to provide Barbados with modern and enforcible environmental laws, nobody should get too excited because Cabinet approval is only the first step in a process that will take many months or even years before we see actual law in place.

After 12 years of not one single environmental dumping charge laid, we will not hold our breath for this present government to produce actual results. Barbados has come to expect talk, studies and more announcements like this one. Real results? No.

But as long as we have Minister Thompson and the Owen Arthur government thinking about the environment, let’s talk about enforcement of environmental laws. Here is our position…

Forget About Using The Police To Enforce Environmental Laws
For at least the last year, and perhaps much longer, Environment Minister Thompson has been going on and on about how she wrote two letters – one to the police and one to the previous Attorney General – to try and have some attention paid to enforcing environmental laws. In February, she mused about having the police go undercover at illegal dumpsites. In May, she blamed the police for not trying to catch people dumping garbage by the roadside, and just last week she was again whining in public about those two letters she wrote a year ago.

Liz – get over it. The Royal Barbados Police Force is not coming to the party. The police are currently 130 officers under strength, violent crime is escalating in Barbados as it is everywhere, and they are busy preparing for Cricket World Cup 2007 – the largest and certainly the most demanding security operation they have ever undertaken. And that is even without considering that some of the participating nations near and far are hotbeds of Muslim terrorism.

The police are not interested in environmental investigations and if they are somehow ordered to act, they will only provide lip-service and feign activity. The police rightly believe that they lack the specialized knowledge and training to enforce environmental law – and that their priorities have to be elsewhere – violent crime, public order and safety.

So forget about using the police to enforce environmental laws. The police might agree to an occasional secondary support role, but to expect anything more is simply unrealistic – and is not the best solution anyway.

Barbados Needs Trained Environmental Enforcement Specialists
The Ministry of the Environment should form it’s own Environmental Law Enforcement Squad to investigate violations, gather evidence, bring charges before the court and to work with the prosecution to prepare and present cases at trial. This is what is done in most other jurisdictions because only a specialized environmental enforcement unit can build the necessary longterm knowledge, training and experience to be effective.