The courts took six years to protect a source. The Bill would take the protection back.

In March 2020, police officers went into the offices of a national newspaper and removed four flash drives from the editor's desk. They were not looking for evidence that the newspaper had committed an offence. They were looking for the person who had told a reporter about the suspicious finances of a senior police officer.[3]

On 29 April 2026, the Court of Appeal held that the search was unconstitutional, upholding the High Court's ruling of January 2021 and awarding $25,000 in compensation. Justices Bereaux and Rajkumar formed the majority; Justice Aboud dissented.[1] Justice Bereaux put the principle at the centre of the judgment: the sanctity of journalistic sources.[2]

The timeline sits beside the ruling. The raid took place in 2020. The first ruling came in 2021. The State appealed, and the final answer arrived in 2026.[4] Six years is long enough for a source to change jobs, to be identified by other means, or to conclude that the protection is theoretical.

That is the practical lesson for anyone thinking of speaking to a reporter in this country: the constitutional protection exists, it works, and it works slowly.

In May, Reporters Without Borders recorded Trinidad and Tobago falling thirteen places in its World Press Freedom Index, from nineteenth to thirty-second, with the local media association citing political influence on editorial independence, the absence of a witness protection scheme, self-censorship in the face of violent crime, and organised digital harassment of journalists.

In September, Parliament was asked to pass a Bill whose clause 15 authorises the search of any place and the seizure of any document, in a declared area, without a warrant from a judge — with no exception on the face of the clause for journalistic material or confidential sources.

The protection the Court of Appeal affirmed in April is a protection against a search conducted under a warrant that a court could later examine. Clause 15 removes the warrant. A seizure carried out under it would be lawful on its face, and the journalist's remedy would be the one just demonstrated: a constitutional claim, an appeal, and a ruling six years later.

Nothing suggests the Bill was drafted with the press in mind. A power drafted without the press in mind is exactly the kind that swallows a protection built up case by case over two decades, because nobody thought to write the exception down.

Parliament has the April judgment in front of it. It sets out, in the words of the country's own appellate court, why journalistic material is different. Transposing that reasoning into clause 15 would take a single subsection.