There is hardly a democratic jurisdiction, that is, one in which citizens enjoy rights, that does not find itself having to pay compensation to citizens when those rights are infringed. This is because the business of the State has to be conducted through human beings who either through ignorance, prejudice or sheer cussedness infringe on citizens’rights in the course of carrying out their official duties.

It is, however, possible to make an estimation of the wholesomeness of a country’s democracy by noting the frequency of those infringements and the cost in monetary compensation to the taxpayer -in whose name, after all, the State is supposed to be always acting. It is in this context that we view with concern-even alarm- the state of our State with respect to the number and resultant cost of the continuing run of its constitutional infringements.

In an exclusive report in the most recent edition of our Sunday Express it was revealed that over a five-year period the annual bill to citizens of constitutional cases the State has lost in court, or thought it wise to settle out of it, is some $100 million as it finds itself forced make amends for having acted wrongly-even viciously-against its own citizens.

Alarmingly, sometimes that wrongdoing can be laid directly at the door of the political directorate as was the telling case brought by the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha when it was denied a radio licence even as one of the ruling party’ favoured sons managed to receive one in record time. Not surprisingly, the courts ruled for the Maha Sabha and we, the citizenry, ended up having to pay millions for what was clearly a gratuitous act of political partisanship.

Then there has been the court-described ’barbaric behaviour’’ of police and prisons officers towards citizens in their custody and supposed care, with said officers behaving as if they are a law unto themselves, bullying and beating as they see fit, as if the mere fact or incarceration or even arrest is enough to expose people to any and every form of punishment, whatever the terms of the sentences set out by the court or even before the court had adjudged them to be guilty or not.

The problem, then, is real and ongoing but, more than that, it is pernicious in the local case which sees public officers who have been guilty of bad-even atrocious-behaviour not only being retained within the ranks but actually being promoted as if such behaviour is not only to be condoned but, one suspects to be emulated. On the evidence, then, Trinidad and Tobago is a parlous democracy where unfairness continues to be rife-from top to bottom.