Do I need to remind you of a recent past when citizens were rounded up, their houses raided and they were dragged kicking and screaming to the police headquarters where they were strip-searched and kept for a night or two in appalling conditions before a court of law released them? I think not. These cases may still be fresh in your minds and the humiliation and agony expressed by those who were targeted for political reasons were amply described in a book you may have read – Provisional Charges: The Untold Human Stories. 

You may also recall that not a single conviction was obtained in those cases and that, on several occasions, the magistrates told the police off for having exceeded their powers or for not displaying a good understanding of the law. In the latest case, Manindra Utchanah vs the State of Mauritius and the police commissioner, Magistrate Dookhy-Rambarun actually ruled that the decision to arrest and detain Utchanah was “illegal and unlawful”. Worse still, she also stated that “… the offence on which the plaintiff was arrested and detained was one that did not exist in law” and that the police had “committed a faute lourde”. To avoid any ambiguity, what the magistrate said is in fact that the police had arrested a victim for a crime they invented and detained him illegally and unlawfully.

“Fifty-six laws will have been changed in one day with little debate. And in one day, we will have fewer rights and liberties, labour protection laws will have been dismantled and the government will have been granted permission to use our money with even more opacity, increasing our debt as it sees fit!”

Now that your memories have been refreshed, guess what? Those hapless citizens who are all suing the government for abusive and unlawful detentions were arrested with a warrant. How the warrant was obtained is a question for another day but at least the law required one. The COVID and Quarantine bills presented in parliament yesterday, in the middle of sycophantic tap latab (table beating), now relieve police officers of the need for a warrant and these new powers go beyond Covid-19 and the confinement. Let that sink in for a moment!

Why were such powers granted to a police force that is not exactly renowned for its independence? Why now? Haven’t we, thanks to the magic wand of the prime minister and his acolytes, already managed to contain the virus, according to the government’s own spin doctors? No answers were expected from the hasty debates in parliament, intended more for show than to convince anyone. And no answers were obtained. What we do know is that, from now on, our rights as citizens will be drastically curtailed.

But the bill not only deprives us of rights we hitherto had under the constitution; it also confers powers on the government, particularly the prime minister, which are arguably unprecedented. And it is generally understood in law that the more discretion the state is afforded, the more chances there are for abuse of power to occur. So now we have a situation where the government can dig deeper into the Bank of Mauritius reserves. We discussed the implications of this at large when the government – prior to COVID – changed the law to raid the Bank. Now, hiding behind coronavirus, it has bestowed upon itself the right to have unlimited access to these reserves. In the same breath, the debt ceiling a government can reach in its borrowings has simply been removed! Think Greece. Think Zimbabwe. Think of the world we are leaving to our children.

Such life-changing decisions are taken at breakneck speed. If the bill being debated goes through as it is, 56 laws will have been changed in one day with little debate. And in one day, we will have fewer rights and liberties, labour protection laws will have been dismantled and the government will have been granted permission to use our money with even more opacity, increasing our debt as it sees fit! In the meantime, unprecedented preposterous fines and prison sentences will have started hanging over our heads like a Damocles sword. All this with retroactive effect. There!

In the weeks and months to come, we will watch helplessly as the full force of the new laws is directed at targeted individuals. We will also understand the motivation behind some obscure laws such as the Pharmacy Act, a dangerous act which will drastically reduce the time some local drugs will take to hit the shelves. There is always an objective behind obscure laws, from the Information and Communication Technologies Act (used recently against Rachna Seenauth for sharing a joke about the prime minister) to the Immigration Act (or the Hoffman Act), going through the prosecution commission bill (or the Boolell bill) and the Finance Act 2016 (also known as the Sobrinho Act). That objective has never been to promote more transparency in government affairs. 

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