A Caribbean diplomat assigned here has strongly cautioned the region’s police officers against acting as judge and jury, even in the face of extreme provocation and stress.

Dennis Francis, Trinidad and Tobago’s High Commissioner to Jamaica, urged lawmen to follow due process, although he agreed that violent crimes were making policing extremely demanding and stressful throughout the region .

Francis gave the keynote address at Friday’s graduation ceremony of the first Human Rights Law and Humanitarian Principles Consolidation Course at the Jamaica Constabulary Staff College, for 24 senior police officers from Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica.

The diplomat acknowledged that crime was rampant in the Caribbean Community nations and had been causing discomfort and disquiet over the last decade, but crime-fighters had a duty to uphold the law.

“Whether it is the apparent assassination of police officers in Guyana, the kidnapping of individuals, including infants and young people in Trinidad and Tobago, or the elimination of an entire family at 100 Lane on the Red Hills Road in Jamaica, it is as if society as a whole is under siege,” Francis said in his prepared text.

But the increasing criminality was not justification for the state or its agents to infringe on the fundamental rights and freedom of its citizens, except in the extraordinary circumstances of a declaration of a State of Emergency, he argued.

“Given the God-given dignity of the human person, human rights are among the most basic of those rights and the state is obligated to uphold and defend them,” Francis insisted.

The Trinidad and Tobago diplomat’s emphasis on human rights comes against the background of a new policy the Jamaican police recently said they had signed off on to limit the use of deadly force. Once the policy is implemented the police expect to see a significant reduction in the number of complaints against policemen about human rights violations.

At the opening of the human rights course on September 1, Alrick Lecky, the assistant commissioner of police in charge of the Jamaican police force’s Corporate Strategy said that the new policy was with National Security Minister Peter Phillips for his approval.

The policy would make annual re-training and certification in firearm use obligatory, set out accounting procedures for weapons and ammunition and make it clear that the primary responsibility for using force rests with the individual police officer, who is accountable to the laws of Jamaica, as well as the Commissioner of Police.

Francis said that because policemen, in the performance of their duties, had to operate in a public contact environment, their behaviour would, to a large degree, condition the attitude of the public towards the police establishment as a whole.

“What civil society asks of you as police officers, as guardians of our security and of public order generally, is to manage your public contact with us in such a manner as to recognise, uphold and if necessary, defend our fundamental human rights, even when we are being apprehended or in custody,” he told the senior cops.

Pointing out that suspicion that a crime had been committed by an individual did not result in the suspension of that individual’s rights under the law, Francis cautioned the policemen not to act as judge and jury even where they had evidence.

“Police officers must therefore be careful, even when there is a preponderance of evidence, not to act as judge and jury, for to do so constitutes an affront to due process,” he said.

Francis, admitting that there were occasions when the police would find it necessary to “apply brute force or to utilise lethal force, in order to save the lives of others including your own”, still cautioned the officers to use force proportional to the threat in the particular situation.

“As respected officers I challenge you to challenge yourself to be vigilant in recognising and respecting the human rights of all our citizens. Those rights are not yours or anyone else’s to give or to take away. They exist in everyone. Human dignity is after all irreducible,” he said.