Musa Defends 13th Amendment, Says Anti‑Crime Powers Already in Law

The debate over Belize’s proposed Thirteenth Amendment is far from cooling down, and today it got another high‑profile voice weighing in. Former Home Affairs Minister Kareem Musa is pushing back against criticism of the constitutional change, saying the public shouldn’t mistake the ongoing legal fine‑tuning for a lapse in the law. According to Musa, the amendment isn’t creating anything new, it’s simply lifting existing anti‑crime measures from the Crime Control and Criminal Justice Reform Act and giving them constitutional backing to prevent future legal challenges. He says states of emergency remain fully supported in law, even as the Attorney General’s office works out the final details of how they’ll be formalized. We caught up with him today for more on the controversy.

 

Kareem Musa, Former Minister of Home Affairs

“When you look at the thirteenth Amendment, it was really just elevating a law that already exists in the Control and Criminal Justice Reform Act and elevating it to the status of the Constitution so as to barred from being attacked, per se, as being an unconstitutional law. So the law is still there and it can still apply. There’s also still a law of the state of emergency that can still apply. We have two conflicting judgements that are going to make their way through the courts to the CCJ eventually, I’m sure. And then we’ll have a clear determination then in terms of the applicability of states of emergencies in Belize. But for the time being, those things are still a law.”

 

And while Kareem Musa insists the Thirteenth Amendment is simply giving existing anti‑crime powers a constitutional shield, the legal back‑and‑forth is far from over. With conflicting rulings now headed for the CCJ, it may be some time before Belize gets a final answer on how far states of emergency can legally go.