PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC – Trinidad and Tobago Thursday celebrated its 50^th anniversary of Republicanism with President Christine Kangaloo saying that the Constitution recognises and protects fundamental rights and freedoms.

She said that those guarantees are not ornaments for tranquil times and that they matter most when fear is greatest and the pressure to set them aside is strongest.

The Head of State said that crime has caused profound grief and anxiety in homes and communities across Trinidad and Tobago and that the state has an undeniable duty to protect life, maintain public order and ensure that citizens can live without fear.

“Yet a mature Republic must protect security, liberty and the sanctity of life together,” she said, adding that “measures adopted in the public interest must remain necessary, proportionate, accountable and subject to the law,” she said, adding that “ exceptional powers must remain truly exceptional”.

She made no reference to the controversial Special Operations Bill, which provides for the establishment of policing districts, the conduct of special operations to combat criminality in those policing districts including also for persons to be in possession of permits to enter or leave those districts.

Attorney General John Jeremie said the legislation does not grant powers equivalent to a state of emergency (SoE) and that the Kamla Persad-Bissessar government accepts that it “might interfere with the right of the individual to liberty and to the enjoyment of property” under the Constitution, as well as the right of the individual to respect his private and family life and the freedom of movement.

“Our view is that any such infringement is reasonable and proportionate,” he added.

President Kangaloo said that Trinidad and Tobago “must be careful that fear does not persuade us, gradually and almost imperceptibly, that freedom is an obstacle to safety.

“Rights surrendered in anxious times are not always easily recovered. The strength of a constitutional democracy is measured not by whether it can exercise power, but by whether it can exercise power effectively without losing sight of the dignity and freedom of the people it exists to serve.”

She said that the same principle of dignity must govern how “we regard one another.

“Trinidad and Tobago was shaped by its First Peoples and by successive journeys of forced passage, indenture, migration, refuge and choice. From those different histories, cultures and faiths, we have fashioned something rare: a national identity spacious enough to contain us all.

“That inheritance places a duty upon us. No citizen should be reduced to a label; and no group should be made to feel that its place in the Republic is conditional. Equal citizenship means that the Republic belongs wholly and equally to every one of us – not by permission, not according to ancestry, and not only when it is politically convenient.”

Kangaloo said that the country’s diversity will not preserve itself.

“ It must be protected in the words we choose, the institutions we maintain and the judgments we make about one another. We honour our national character when we speak firmly without cruelty, enforce the law without contempt, disagree without dehumanising, and refuse to turn difference into suspicion.”

She said Republican government also requires an active citizenry, noting “our duty is not exhausted by voting, nor by supporting those with whom we agree.

“It includes scrutinising power, defending the rights of others as carefully as our own, rejecting language that coarsens our common life, and insisting that public institutions serve the whole nation. The health of the Republic depends as much upon the standards citizens demand as upon the standards leaders observe.

“After 50 years, the question is no longer whether we are capable of governing ourselves. It is whether we will govern ourselves well: with courage, but without harshness; with vigilance, but without fear; with pride in who we are, but without hostility towards those who are different.

“The Republic is not merely the constitutional settlement we inherited in 1976. It is the daily choice to live as one people under law; to preserve both order and freedom; and to keep an equal place for every citizen within the national embrace. If we make that choice deliberately and consistently, we will not simply commemorate the promise of the Republic. We will renew it,” she told the nation.

Meanwhile, Chief Justice, Ronnie Boodoosingh, Senate President Wade Mark and former legislator, Dr Surujrattan Rambachan have all received the country’s highest award, the Order of Trinidad and Tobago (ORTT).