Kennard asked to step down as PCA Chairman due to age

- Ramjattan

Chairman of the Police Complaints Authority (PCA) retired Justice Cecil Kennard has been asked to step down from office due to his age, Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan said yesterday.

“Yes, that’s correct,” Ramjattan said when asked yesterday. “He is almost over 80 and the president indicated to me that he sent him a letter and he will be removed … by the end of February,” he added.

According to the minister, the search for a replacement is the responsibility of the Ministry of the Presidency because “it is exclusively his (the president’s) jurisdiction to appoint.”

Kennard assumed chairmanship of the PCA in 2002 and according to Ramjattan, he performed “excellently

even while we [government] were in the opposition.” He added that the reports given by Kennard are “excellent reports.”

“He was a Chancellor. He is a quality jurist and of course he knows the job, of the judges’ rules, how policemen should behave, the norms that go with that highly professional vocation and so he has performed very well and has done almost on every score, the right things in relation to his recommendations after the investigations,” Ramjattan added.

In an interview earlier this month, Kennard told this newspaper that his team of investigators expedited most of the 840 cases brought before it last year. He had outlined plans for this year, including visits to all ten administrative regions. Also on the to do list for 2017, he had said, is the decentralisation of the PCA’s operations and the hiring of an additional seven investigators through an Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)-funded project.