Nearly three years after the Tivoli Gardens incursion, action has been brought against the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), seeking to compel it to release aerial surveillance footage of the operation which led to the deaths of more than 70 civilians.
Three students of the Yale Law School in the US have brought a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) action against the agency.
The students filed the suit on behalf of Mattathias Schwartz, the reporter who covered the deadly May 2010 raid for The New Yorker magazine.
The suit, which was filed on December 19, 2012, arose from Freedom of Information requests that Mr. Schwartz had made to the DEA and other federal agencies for records pertaining to the Tivoli incursion.
The DEA has until January 22 to respond.
In 2010, the police and military entered Tivoli Gardens in a bid to arrest Christopher “Dudus” Coke, and extradite him to the United States to face charges for trafficking in narcotics and firearms.
Through his reporting, Mr. Schwartz discovered that the US government had provided assistance by dispatching an aircraft to survey the operation and pass on intelligence to the Jamaican forces on the ground.
According to an article on the Yale Law School website, although the DEA has acknowledged in response to Mr. Schwartz’s requests that it is in possession of six DVDs containing aerial surveillance footage of the raid, it has refused to release them, citing six exemptions under the US Freedom of Information Act.
The students, who are members of Yale's Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic (MFIA), argue in the complaint, filed in federal district court in the Eastern District of New York, that none of the exemptions are applicable to the footage being sought.
The MFIA was established to, among other things, defend the public’s right of access to government information.
Jamaicans for Justice (JFJ), a local human rights lobby group, is demanding answers from Parliament as to why the Office of the Public Defender has still not produced a report on its investigation into the Tivoli Gardens incursion. Earl Witter, the Public Defender, has missed self-imposed deadlines to produce the report.
Susan Goffe, executive director of the lobby group, told the RJR News Centre that it is unacceptable that the country remains in the dark on the status of the probe.
“We are at a point of being stalled in this process because this, a report, is the next step in forcing the way forward. So here we are in 2013 and we will be calling on the Speaker of the House to update us on what the position currently is.”
Mrs. Goffe disclosed that a petition containing 200 names collected online was submitted to Parliament last month.
The petition called for the Office of the Public Defender to be provided with the necessary resources so that the report on the Tivoli investigation can be submitted by the end of this month.
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