Prime Minister Andrew Holness has emphasised that the Government will continue to impose states of emergency (SOEs) to combat the country’s worrying crime problem.

He reiterated his Administration’s position last Wednesday as he announced that the Governor-General, on the advice of the Commissioner of Police and Chief of Defence Staff, had declared a new round of SOEs for the parishes of Kingston and St Andrew, St Catherine, Clarendon and St Ann as well as St James, Westmoreland and Hanover. The latest SOEs will run from December 28 to January 11.

“As I’ve said in many presentations in Parliament, we will use this tool as long as there is a threat to life, property and communities that are on so extensive a scale that it will deprive citizens of their rights and freedoms, and the situation is over and above the capacity of our regular law enforcement.

“That is the definition, built into the constitution, of the state of emergency,” said Holness. He stressed that it does not have to be an exceptional situation that has happened for a SOE to be declared “because you have emergency situations that routinely occur”.

The prime minister’s statement at the Jamaica House press briefing came before legal scholars and the parliamentary Opposition warned over the weekend that there could be court challenges to the government’s repeated use of two-week SOEs to get around the constitution since it failed to get Opposition support in the Parliament to keep the security measure in place for longer periods.

A SOE can be legally enforced for two weeks at a time after it is initially declared. After that, it needs a two-thirds vote in both houses of Parliament to be extended for up to three months at a time. While it has the required votes in the House of Representatives by virtue of controlling 49 of the 63 seats in the lower chamber, it requires the support of one of the eight Opposition senators to hit the two-thirds requirement in the 21-member Senate.

The government has declared SOEs on November 15, December 6 and December 28 last year and on the previous two occasions failed to win the support of the Opposition to extend them. The Opposition has argued that the repeated use of SOEs is unconstitutional and that the country’s rmurder rate remains high despite numerous SOEs being imposed since 2017. The government insists SOEs save lives and argues that no court has ruled the emergency measure to be unconstitutional.

The courts have previously declared aspects of the regulations governing SOEs unconstitutional and have awarded millions of dollars in damages to persons whose rights were breached as a result.