Parliament has fast-tracked the Fiji Police Bill 2026 – Bill No. 12 of 2026 – to the Standing Committee on Justice, Law and Human Rights. The Bill replaces the Police Act 1965, a colonial relic six decades past its useful life, with a modern framework addressing cybercrime, digital evidence, DNA forensics, and organised crime. That purpose is legitimate. What is not acceptable is how this Bill pursues it – through provisions that are constitutionally unsound, structurally draconian, and dangerous in the hands of an institution that between May 2015 and April 2020 saw four hundred officers charged with serious violent offences including sixteen counts of rape, two counts of murder, and nine counts of manslaughter (FT, 12-13 November 2020). The people of Fiji have a right to know what is being proposed in their name before it becomes law.
When politics commands the police
SECTIONS 8 and 9 create a statutory mechanism through which an elected minister can issue binding directions to the commissioner – and Section 8(4) makes the Commissioner subservient to those directions during a declared State of Emergency. In July 2021 nine opposition MPs were arrested for criticising a Land Bill. In December 2025 a former MP was charged by FICAC for a social media post. Section 8(4) must be amended to prohibit any ministerial direction from interfering with specific operations, arrest decisions, or individual investigations – powers that must remain the commissioner’s exclusive responsibility.
Arresting citizens for what they might do
Section 47 authorises arrest without warrant of a person an officer “suspects on reasonable grounds is about to commit an offence”. No offence category is specified. No imminence threshold is defined. No supervisory authorisation is required. This is pre-emptive detention – imprisoning a citizen not for what they have done, but for what a police officer believes they might do. In Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, pre-emptive arrest powers are tightly constrained by specified offence categories and judicially reviewable standards. Section 47 must be restricted to specific indictable offences with a prescribed imminence standard – incompatible as it stands with Section 9 of the 2013 Constitution.
Searching your home before a court approves
Section 52 permits police to enter and search any place without prior judicial authorisation if an officer “reasonably suspects” evidence may be concealed. Retrospective magistrate approval is required afterward, but the privacy violation has already occurred. Your home has already been entered. Retrospective inadmissibility restores nothing. Prior judicial authorisation is the norm in every comparable democracy and must be the norm in Fiji. The Bill must require a prior warrant as the rule with any urgent exception subject to mandatory judicial review within 24 hours.
Surrendering your password or going to jail
Sections 88 to 91 are the most constitutionally dangerous provisions in the Bill. A court may order any person who uses a digital device to surrender passwords, decryption keys, and access information to police. Section 91(2) states explicitly that self-incrimination is not a valid reason to refuse. Section 14(2)(k) of Fiji’s 2013 Constitution guarantees the right to remain silent. Ireland’s Supreme Court in 2025 confirmed the privilege against self-incrimination retains real application in the digital context. Section 91(2) overrides a constitutional guarantee by ordinary statute – not by constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds majority and referendum. The Standing Committee must seek an urgent Attorney-General opinion on Section 91(2) before this Bill proceeds to its second reading.
Banned from leaving without being heard
Section 69 empowers police to apply to court for a stop departure order prohibiting a person under investigation from leaving Fiji – with no requirement to be present at the application or heard before the order is made. A Fijian citizen can be prohibited from leaving their country – restricting freedom of movement under Section 21 of the Constitution – on the basis of a police application made entirely without their knowledge. The natural justice principle of audi alteram partem is structurally absent. Section 69 must require either prior notice or a mandatory post-order hearing within 24 hours of service.
Complaints the commissioner can kill
Section 127 grants the commissioner unilateral power to summarily dismiss public complaints against police staff. Section 130 establishes the genuinely independent Disciplinary Tribunal appointed by the Chief Justice, but the commissioner holds a veto over which complaints ever reach it. In a force where four hundred officers faced violent offence charges between 2015 and 2020, this front-end veto is not efficiency. It is impunity. Section 127 must require that any proposed summary dismissal be reviewed by an independent civilian Police Complaints Review Panel appointed entirely outside the police hierarchy.
Surveillance by telephone – the 48-hour oral warrant
Sections 57 to 61 authorise a senior officer to apply by telephone for a covert warrant to secretly monitor any conduct and communication – including all telecommunications – of any person suspected of a covert operation offence. The oral warrant is valid for 48 hours immediately. In a country where the Online Safety Act 2018 has been used to investigate journalists for online expression, a telephone application for comprehensive surveillance without independent oversight is an extraordinary concentration of secret State power. Australia’s Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 requires written applications and mandatory six-monthly Attorney-General reporting. Fiji’s Bill requires a telephone call.
A colonial offence that silences whistleblowers
Section 148 creates an offence of causing disaffection or discontent among police staff – lifted verbatim from colonial-era statutes designed to suppress criticism, prevent union organisation, and silence whistleblowers. An officer who witnesses brutality and speaks to a journalist faces prosecution. A civil society researcher whose findings cause discontent among officers faces the same exposure. This provision has no place in a Bill introduced nine years after Fiji’s return to parliamentary democracy. It is a deliberate colonial inheritance and an insult to every Fijian who fought for democratic freedoms. Section 148 must be removed entirely.
Good faith immunity that shields misconduct
Section 161 protects police staff from liability for acts done in good faith, but good faith is subjective and undefined. In a country where four hundred officers faced charges including rape, murder, and manslaughter between 2015 and 2020, and where the Coalition on Human Rights has documented deaths in police custody, a broad undefined immunity clause is institutional impunity dressed in legislative language. The Bill must define good faith with statutory precision, exclude deliberate violence and torture, and make clear that no immunity under Section 161 extends to conduct violating Section 11 of the Constitution – the absolute right of every Fijian to freedom from torture.
The Standing Committee must go deep
The provisions examined here collectively represent a pattern of executive overreach the Standing Committee must address systematically. The Fiji Law Society, the Coalition on Human Rights, the Fijian Media Association, the University of the South Pacific Faculty of Law, and every civil society organisation with standing must be given genuine hearing time – not a tokenistic submission window. Fiji has waited 61 years for a modern Police Act. It can wait the additional weeks to get this one right. A Bill that cannot survive rigorous public scrutiny does not deserve parliamentary passage. The Standing Committee holds that opportunity. Every Fijian is watching how it uses it.
