Africa-Press – Mauritius. An issue that has been flagged previously in these columns and by concerned citizens and public-spirited legists relates to the abuse that has been made of provisional charges.
Besides police action directed at suspects in drug trafficking cases, there have so many disturbing cases of police action during the last ten years targeting specific people, mostly in Opposition, and in some cases conducted in the most outlandish of ways that it was deemed necessary to rethink the “provisional charges” provisions that would ignore the test of reasonable suspicion.
No remedial action has been forthcoming. The abuse that’s made of provisional charges remains a recurring problem and what we have been given to witness these last months is an ongoing tussle between the Office of the DPP and the Police – a first in the annals of this country – over who calls the shots in matters of arrest and detention of suspects.
The police are obviously hard-pressed dealing with the serious drug abuse and trafficking situation in the country as evidenced by the thousands of drug offences involving not only adults but also minors and young people under the age of 25 registered every year. Mistakes are bound to happen, and provisional charges are thereafter dropped in such cases.
The latest statistics available relating to provisional charges come from the answer to the PQ put by MP Reza Uteem in June 2016, which indicates that between January 2015 and June 2016, the police had lodged 14,728 provisional charges, out of which 5,217 were struck out in court for lack of any evidence.
One would expect that any police investigation would comply with the rule of law and ensure that the fundamental rights of suspects would be respected.
In view of suspicions that that would not be the case in many cases, the call for the introduction of the ‘Juge d’instruction’, modelled on the French system, was made.
This idea seems to have been dropped, and it’s still not clear when a piece of legislation modelled on the UK’s Police and Criminal Evidence Act, introduced in 1984, which is meant to govern the use of police powers as well as balance the rights of the individual against the powers of the police, will be enacted. A Bill to that effect was drafted as far back as 2013, and it has yet to go through the legislative process.
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