When Will Belize Implement a Witness Protection Program?

A witness protection program is yet to be put in place to ensure the safety of persons who are willing to cooperate with prosecutors during trials.  By and large, the Belize Police Department has had serious challenges getting witnesses to testify in court, particularly where murder cases are concerned.  Legislation was introduced during the last house meeting that would make way for a program to be implemented that would allow witnesses to testify in court under the condition of anonymity. This morning on Open Your Eyes, Commissioner of Police Chester Williams spoke about the difficulties that law enforcement has had with getting witnesses to cooperate.

Chester Williams

Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police

“We have to be real and we have to be fair and we have to do an analysis to see what is the reason why the society, people are not cooperating with the justice system and one of the main reasons that we have heard is that people fear for their lives. They fear that if they were to give a statement to the police on a crime they may have witnessed, that they can become a victim and that sense of feeling is real. We have seen it play out many times, and so what is being done, again, I must commend our minister and the attorney general for pushing the witness anonymity bill to go through. It was introduced in the house last Friday and I am hoping that pretty soon it will go through the stages and become law because what that bill is going to do is, while it is not want we want exactly… it’s an anonymity bill.  It is not exactly what we want but it is a start. It will allow the prosecution to, when disclosing statements to the defense, the prosecution can apply to the magistrate to remove or to blot out any information on that statement that may be able to identify who the witness is so that the witness’ name, the witness’ age, the witness’ address, where the witness works, all of those things will be removed from the statement. It will also provide the prosecution to make applications to the court for a trial to be done via Zoom or for the witness to testify from behind a screen or a wall.”