Min­is­ter of De­fence Wayne Sturge says the Gov­ern­ment may con­sid­er amend­ing ex­ist­ing leg­is­la­tion to sup­port the ef­fec­tive roll­out of the Mil­i­tary-Led Aca­d­e­m­ic Train­ing (MI­LAT) and Mil­i­tary-Led Youth Pro­gramme of Ap­pren­tice­ship and Re­ori­en­ta­tion Train­ing (MY­PART) ini­tia­tives, par­tic­u­lar­ly for stu­dents re­quired to stay overnight at camps.

In an in­ter­view out­side the Red House yes­ter­day, Sturge ex­plained that while plans for both pro­grammes are ad­vanc­ing, any form of com­pul­so­ry res­i­dence would first re­quire parental con­sent and could raise le­gal con­cerns around per­son­al lib­er­ty.

“It’s pre­ma­ture right now,” he said, “but the thing is, with both pro­grammes, if stu­dents have to stay in or overnight and be a part of the camp, it re­quires the con­sent of the par­ents first of all—be­cause in a sense, it could be per­ceived as a de­pri­va­tion of lib­er­ty.”