Independence of the judiciary in the Caribbean

by Oscar Ramjeet:


There is separation of powers in the English-speaking Caribbean and throughout the Commonwealth, but sometimes the question arises whether or not there is independence of the judiciary. Although there might be complaints in some quarters, it seems to me that the judiciary is independent in the Caribbean Community.

In fact, I met several heads of the judiciary and senior jurists in the region in Barbados recently and heard no significant complaint.

The decision last month by Guyanese-born Justice Gertel Thom in St Vincent and the Grenadines to make an order for the continuation of an injunction to block the Boundaries Commission from increasing the number of constituencies from 15 to 17 until the determination of the substantive action brought by the opposition New Democratic Party (NDP) has prompted me to look at the operations of judges in the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court (ECSC).

Justice Thom's decision was a rather bold one, since it is not favourable to the United Labour Party administration in the multi island state, and I must say that it is commendable for Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves to make a public statement accepting the court's decision (whether or not he meant it is another matter). However, the fact that he issued a favourable comment augers well for the relationship between the executive and the judiciary in that country.

This is contrary to Antigua and Barbuda, where a minister of government made adverse comments against the trial judge who ruled against Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer and two other ministers of government in a election petition case, which now has the administration in limbo. The Antiguan minister said that if the judge had given such decision in Jamaica she could not have walked out of court -- a very unfortunate statement, which was criticised by the opposition Antigua Labour Party (ALP).

Guyanese-born Justice Louise Blenman made a very bold decision in Antigua when she found that there were breaches in the process of the last general elections in the constituencies that elected Spencer, John Maginley, Minister of Tourism, and Jacqui Quinn Leandro, Minister of Education, and vacated the three seats. But another judge the same day stayed the order and appeals were filed and later heard by the Appellate Court, but the decision has not yet been given by Chief Justice Hugh Rawlins and the two other appellate judges.

Over in Dominica, Vincentian-born judge Errol Thomas on August 25 made a ruling that Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerritt and one of his ministers, Peter Saint Jean, should face trial over a claim that they were not eligible to contest the last general elections because they have dual citizenship.

The same judge had made another controversial decision last October in St Kitts when he ruled in the boundaries case in which he found that the Denzil Douglas government violated the Constitution.

It is interesting to note that Justice Thomas was transferred on September 1 from Antigua and Barbuda to St Kitts.

Another Vincentian-born judge, Brian Cottle, made a ruling in St Lucia in August last year in which he ruled that a Cabinet conclusion on the Tuxedo Villas affair that allowed the Health Minister concessions for his Bonne Terre home as part of his Tuxedo Villas mini hotel was unreasonable and had to be quashed.

An appeal against Cottle's ruling was dismissed by the Court of Appeal last June.

Although judges of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court are appointed by the Judicial and Legal Services Commission (JLSC) and do not fall under the regional governments, the administration is nevertheless responsible for accommodation, security, clerical staff, etc., and perhaps at liberty to make "life difficult for them" in their day to day activities.

It is said that judges who are close to the administration can get better facilities than others, but there is no serious complaint in this regard.

September 15, 2010

caribbeannewsnow

Bahamas Blog International

Saga of Taiwan politics/business in Caricom

ANALYSIS

RICKEY SINGH



WHETHER at the level of its government or private business interests, Taiwan seems to be creating problems for some of the member states of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) as it continues its long, arduous battle for international recognition to secure membership of the United Nations as a sovereign state.

In our Caribbean region, Taiwan -- which the Chinese officially view as a 'renegade province' of the People's Republic of China — has been investing in what came to be known as "dollar diplomacy" to influence support among political parties.

Since the dawning of political independence 48 years ago in the English-speaking Caribbean, first in Jamaica, Taiwan's effort to win friends and influence votes on its behalf has proven to be a dismal failure.

The present count of converts is a mere four of the 14 independent countries of Caricom -- Belize, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines and St Lucia -- as more and more community partners walked away from diplomatic ties.

That's despite the financial generosity displayed by the Government in Taipei towards parties across the political divide in this region -- at times dealing with both ruling and opposition parties in the same country. St Vincent and the Grenadines has long been such an example.

While it suffered losses in once-firm relations with countries like The Bahamas, Dominica and Grenada, it is in St Lucia that Taiwan was to secure a very surprising return with a change in government in Castries at the December 2006 general election after the defeat of the then two-term St Lucia Labour Party (SLP) by the United Workers Party (UWP).

$$ diplomacy


And it is in that Windward Island state that Taiwanese-style 'dollar diplomacy' was to manifest itself in a most aggressive and contemptuous manner in political financing which reportedly contributed significantly to the return of the UWP to power and subsequent severing of relations with China.

The daughter of the late founder-leader of the UWP and once long-serving prime minister, Sir John Compton, was to show courage and honesty in post-election financial accountability.

Shortly after the UWP's return to power, Taiwan succeeded in replacing China in diplomatic ties, against the advice of the then seriously ill Sir John.

Following the death of her father, and amid open political controversies over Taipei's diplomatic replacement of Beijing, Jannine Compton was to disclose in Parliament how she had spent some EC $1 million, made available from Taiwanese funding, for projects in her Micoud North constituency.

As of this September, and with some 15 months more before a constitutionally due new general election -- though expected earlier -- none of the other 10 Government MPs of Prime Minister Stephen King's administration has yet accounted for expenditures in their respective constituencies as allocated directly by Taiwan through its embassy in Castries.

At this period in regional and international politics, when there are growing demands for accountability of election campaign financing -- an issue currently seriously engaging politicians and parties in Jamaica, for instance -- the Tawain/UWP $$ connection appears headed for a decisive phase in the electoral politics of that Caricom member state.

The Opposition SLP of former Prime Minister Dr Kenny Anthony, which -- like the ruling UWP -- is currently actively preparing for new general elections, has already made clear its anxiety for the expulsion of the Taiwanese ambassador to Castries for what it claims is his "arrogant and contemptuous" involvement in St Lucia's domestic affairs.

Embarrassing deal

Meanwhile, in Grenada, there is a different kind of problem for the Government of Prime Minister Tilman Thomas involving a deal with a Taiwanese group of investors that seems to have gone terribly wrong.

It has resulted from a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that Prime Minister Thomas signed in May this year with a Taiwanese company known as Sewang One World (SOW) for development financing of well over US$2 billion on various projects.

However, there came the sensational disclosure last month that primary figures of SOW had been arrested by the Taiwanese authorities for bank fraud and linked to the establishment of dummy companies in Taiwan, South Korea and the USA.

By September 3, the Grenada Government was ready to publicly confess its error in signing the MOU with the Taiwanese company without first undertaking an appropriate due diligence exercise.

Finance Minister Nazim Burke has stated that it was wrong to enter into the MOU without careful scrutiny of SOW. He has also disclosed to the media in St George's that it was "regrettable" that Prime Minister Thomas and his office were "exposed to the (Taiwanese) company without required due diligence". According to Burke, the entire business deal with SOW has now been abandoned.

News of the charges against the SOW representatives were first learnt of in Grenada from an August 24 report in the China Times of Taiwan.

Interestingly, this same Taiwanese company had first established business contact in 2004 with the then Government of former Prime Minister Keith Mitchell during the diplomatic romance between Taipei and St George's.

Later came the ditching of Grenada's diplomatic relations with Taiwan by the Mitchell Government in favour of China, which has been maintained by the current administration of Prime Minister Thomas.

What next, I wonder, in the saga of Taiwanese politics and business deals in the Caribbean?

September 12, 2010

jamaicaobserver

Bahamas Blog International

The British Caribbean and its history

By Franklyn W Knight:


The English-speaking population of the Caribbean represents less than 20 per cent of the conventionally defined region. That definition describes a Caribbean composed of the island chain from the Bahamas and the Dutch ABC islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao plus the mainland enclaves of Belize, Guyana and Suriname. Sometimes Bermuda is included although its 68,000 additional souls hardly change the proportion.

In the 1980s a new political definition became popular. It added the Central American states but omitted Cuba, displaying more the political bias of the United States of America rather than the reality of Caribbean affairs and the peculiar history of the region. The driving force behind the conventional definition of the Caribbean was a certain uniformity of history. The states of the conventional Caribbean were inordinately influenced by the interrelated sugar revolutions that convulsed the region between the 17th and the 19th centuries.

These sugar revolutions radically transformed the political, social, occupational, economic, demographic, and environmental structure of most of the Caribbean islands. Sugar was the principal driving force but it was not the only one and not all the islands succumbed to those revolutions. The massive importation of Africans - more than 10 million between 1518 and 1870 - made possible the transformation of the vast region between the northeast of Brazil, the Antilles, the Magdalena-Cauca river valleys of Colombia and a huge swath of the southern part of what today is called the United States of America. But African slavery affected every country in the Americas to some degree.

Slavery, of course, existed long before Christopher Columbus and his ill-fated caravels wandered into the Caribbean. Slaves constituted an integral part of Roman expansion and colonisation of most of Western Europe. The preferred slaves of Romans came from the region that today comprises Germany. But the word itself derives from the Slavic peoples who formed the greater proportion of people who were traded in the slave markets of the Mediterranean. Europeans continued to enslave one another until the middle of the 19th century, although mostly in Russia. And Muslim states enslaved captured Europeans in the Mediterranean until the Napoleonic Wars.

African and indigenous American peoples also enslaved one another. Throughout the continent of Africa, stronger states subordinated weaker states and subjected their conquered peoples to some form of slavery. Among other occupations, male slaves were employed as warriors or protectors of harems and religious sites. In Mexico a system of slavery called Tlacotli existed until the arrival of Hernán Cortés in 1521.

Slavery in the Americas reconstructed by the Europeans and their slaves finds no precedence anywhere else in the world. Neither in Europe, Africa nor among the indigenous societies of the Americas did the practice demonstrate the rigidity and suffocating mutually reinforcing cleavages developed after 1518. Only in the European American colonies were race and colour essential aspects of enslavement. Only in the Americas did slavery perform a vitally important economic function, assets that could independently generate wealth. The American slave society and the American slave-holding society were fundamentally different.

Nevertheless, the way the history of the Caribbean is taught, especially in the British Caribbean, leaves much to be desired. It tends to be excessively centred on the British Caribbean experience and neglects the integral connection with the non-Anglophone Caribbean or with the wider Americas.

To begin, not all Africans arrived in the Americas as merchandise. Several Hispanised Africans arrived with the Iberians in the first century of conquest and colonisation. Columbus recruited travel companions such as Juan Garrido and Pedro Alonso Niño from among the large free black population that lived in Andalucía, in cities from Málaga to Huelva. Nuflo de Olano who accompanied Vasco Nuñez de Balboa across the Isthmus of Panama was probably a bought African slave. Juan Valiente who accompanied Hernán Cortés to Mexico was described as black. So was Estebanico who wandered for 10 years with Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca from Florida to Mexico by way of Louisiana and Texas.

These free blacks, like their fellow adventurers, spawned a large, free, mixed population wherever they went. There were blacks and descendants of blacks all across the Americas who were never enslaved. They formed pockets of free population in cities, especially port cities like Havana, New Orleans, Vera Cruz, Porto Bello, Cartagena, Lima, Salvador de Bahia and Buenos Aires. And the town of El Cobre in eastern Cuba had a town council of freed and semi-free residents between 1680 and 1780.

During the 19th century another group of free Africans arrived along with Chinese and Indians from the Asian subcontinent to assist in the transition from slave labour to wage labour across the Caribbean. While smaller than the imported numbers of the commercial transatlantic slave trade, these immigrants are a part of the history that should not be neglected.

The massive importation of Africans was necessary because, unlike the narratives of Bartolomé de las Casas, the population of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean in 1492 was not as large as the friar supposed. The Caribbean islands may have had a combined population of just about one million. That population could not support the increased labour demands of export-oriented plantations. The decline of the Native American population between 1500 and about 1650 was extremely complex and not the result of the single or simplistic explanation of Spanish genocide. Indeed, genocide is an inappropriate description for the decline of the Tainos of the Antilles.

But slavery is not the only theme in which moving the boundaries beyond time and space offers rewards. Hispaniola had a relatively early sugar complex - as early as 1512. The distillation of rum has a history preceding the English arrival in Barbados. Rum was distilled in the 13th century by Benedictine monks in Lebanon. Maroons were not really instrumental in the process of disintegration of the Caribbean slave society, and their role in the Haitian revolution seems highly exaggerated. Finally, the peasant society in the Caribbean goes back to the 16th century.

July 07, 2010

jamaicaobserver

Bahamas Blog International

Bahamas: Nurse shortage could hamper nation's development

By Krystel Rolle ~ Guardian Staff Reporter ~ krystel@nasguard.com:


A severe shortage of nurses could cripple the nation's development, according to a World Bank report, which named The Bahamas among a group of Caribbean countries that suffers from the deficiency.

The report, which was released last week, noted that nursing shortages across the English-speaking Caribbean limit access to and the quality of health services and affect the region's competitiveness.

The report revealed, "According to (the study) 'The Nurse Labor and Education Markets in the English-speaking CARICOM - Issues and Options for Reform,' the region is facing a rapidly growing shortage of nurses as demand for quality health care increases due to an aging population, and high numbers of nurses emigrate, drawn by higher paying jobs in Canada, the UK and the USA."

Pointing to the severity of The Bahamas' shortage on Thursday, Minister of Health Dr. Hubert Minnis said The Bahamas has 26 nurses to every 10,000 people, while countries like the United States have 100 nurses per 10,000 people.

"And they are short," Dr. Minnis said, referring to the United States.

"The World Bank estimates that there are 7,800 nurses working in the English-speaking Caribbean (CARICOM), or 1.25 nurses per 1,000 people, roughly one-tenth the concentration in some OECD countries. In addition, demand for nurses exceeds their supply throughout the region: 3,300 or 30 percent of all positions in the sector were vacant at the time of the study."

The World Bank said such shortages can hinder the Caribbean.

"These shortages have tangible impacts that may compromise the ability of English-speaking CARICOM countries to meet their key health care service needs, especially in the areas of disease prevention and care. In addition, the shortage of highly-trained nurses reduces the capacity of countries to offer quality health care at a time when Caribbean countries aim to attract businesses and retirees as an important pillar of growth."

The World Bank said in the coming years, demand for nurses in the English-speaking Caribbean will increase due to the health needs of the aging population.

"Under current education and labor market conditions, however, supply will slightly decrease. The World Bank expects that unmet demand for nurses will more than triple during the next 15 years — from 3,300 nurses in 2006 to 10,700 nurses in 2025."

A study undertaken by an international research group and recently highlighted by Health Minister Dr. Minnis has determined that The Bahamas has an aging population.

An aging population is usually characterized by an increase in a population's mean and median ages, a decline in the proportion comprised of children and young adults, and a rise in the proportion that is elderly.

Minnis said over the next 20 years the number of young persons in the population will diminish.

"We will find that the numbers of individuals between the ages of zero to 20 will decrease, whereas the number of individuals between the ages of 45-65 and older will increase," Dr. Minnis said last week.

Meantime, the World Bank said data suggests that the number of English-speaking CARICOM trained nurses working in Canada, the UK and the US is about 21,500, which is about three times higher than the workforce in the English-speaking CARICOM.

"The new World Bank report also points to high demand for nurse education but low completion rates (55 percent) as a challenge and an opportunity in tackling nurse shortages," the report said. "Having more nurse tutors available, maximizing completion rates and accepting more students into programs would significantly bolster the number of new nurses entering the health system."

To meet the demand for nurses in the English-speaking Caribbean, the report suggests Caribbean countries increase training capacity; manage migration; strengthen data quality and availability; and adopt a regional approach.

"Given the size and the linkages of local nurse labor markets, no country in the region is in a position to efficiently tackle the challenges ahead on its own," the report said. "Therefore, countries should ideally join forces and adopt a regional approach to increasing training capacity, managing migration and strengthening the evidence-base, if possible, with technical and financial support from countries where a large part of their nurse workforce will tend to migrate to Canada, the UK and the US."

Dr. Minnis said The Ministry of Health is already working to alleviate the problem. According to him there are currently 127 high school students participating in his ministry's nursing program. He added that the ministry is looking to launch a program for junior high school students.

He said the government has provided 53 scholarships for students studying nursing. Additionally, he said there are 155 nursing students in The College of The Bahamas.

The English-speaking Caribbean includes Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

March 08, 2010

thenassauguardian

Bahamas Blog International

Our leadership paradox in the Caribbean

Michael Harris:


This past week I was in Jamaica where the venerable daily newspaper the Gleaner took the unprecedented step of publishing a series of four consecutive special editorials essentially calling on all sectors of Jamaican society to rally together to find solutions to the deep and seemingly endemic problems which that country faces.

In addition to the Gleaner’s own editorials, the paper also invited several prominent citizens to a round-table discussion in which they were asked not only to address what they saw as the causes of the problems but to put forward their views as to the required solutions.

What struck me about the whole discussion was the almost unanimous view of the several participants that a key component of the problem was the failure of leadership in the years since independence. What makes such a perspective really remarkable is the fact that Jamaica has had, since independence, a progression of exceedingly powerful and, in some cases, extremely charismatic leaders.

From the heroes of the nationalist movement, Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, to Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, to PJ Patterson, Jamaica has had no dearth of strong leaders. How is it then that today, 47 years after independence, prominent voices in society, including former prime minister Seaga himself, could look at their history and conclude that a key contributory factor to the nation’s problems was a failure of leadership?

That question goes to the heart of the political conundrum not only of Jamaica but of the entire English-speaking Caribbean. The key political legacy in all these countries was a model of governance in which all power and authority resided in the person of the governor, the representative of the imperial power.

In some countries, some sectors of the society enjoyed varying degrees of representation but even in such instances these sectors still saw themselves and their status in relation to their degree of access to such centralised power. As for the people in general theirs was a condition of total powerlessness and zero access to power.

The only real change in the model had come a few years before political independence with the general introduction of full adult suffrage which meant that the masses of people could no longer be completely ignored but had to be wooed periodically for their support.

This in turn, after a while, led to the advent of political parties as the most effective means of corralling the support of people behind different political leaders. However these political parties for the most part never became institutions of people participation, where the ordinary supporters could engage in policy debate and discussion, and be exposed to political education and development.

The consequences of this in the post-independence period were several. In the first place the leaders who came into government inherited the enormous powers of the colonial executive but did not have, either inside their political parties or outside, any institutionalised channels for consulting the views of the people on the policies and programmes to be adopted.

On the other hand the political parties themselves, being simply vehicles for electoral mobilisation rather than political mobilisation, possessed no powers of constraint on the exercise of governmental power by their leaders.

The further result was a critical disconnect between the political leaders in government and the mass of their supporters, a disconnect which, for electoral purposes, could only be bridged by the sustained proffering of patronage. There is no country in the English-speaking Caribbean in which this is not the essential characteristic of the major political parties.

Herein lies the heart of the leadership paradox in Jamaica, as in Trinidad, as in every one of our Caribbean countries. Our leaders possess enormous amounts of legal and constitutional authority which they inherited when they took over the colonial model of governance. They are, in fact, our modern-day governors. The problem is that they are incapable of transforming such overwhelming authority into genuine political power, if we understand political power to be the ability to persuade and commit.

And the truth is that under conditions of independence, our governments, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how ’strong’, will never be able to solve the kind of economic and social problems we have in the Caribbean without persuading the vast majority of citizens to commit themselves to the effort and the sacrifices necessary for the solutions which we need to work.

That is the paradox. So many powerful leaders possessing so little leadership capacity. For leadership capacity does not depend on oratorical skills, it does not depend on intellectual ability, it does not depend of innate goodness and it certainly does not depend on divine drunkenness.

Leadership capacity depends on the existence and maintenance of institutions of political information, consultation and exchange between leaders and supporters which, when used in a genuine way and on a sustained basis, allows the leaders to time and space to persuade and commit. In short it depends on the existence of genuine political parties rather than election mobilisation outfits.

I am not familiar enough with Jamaica to hazard a guess as to what will happen there. Here in Trinidad however all the signs point to a total collapse of the old politics and with it the old political parties. That eventuality surely must present us with a golden opportunity to fashion new institutions of leadership.

December 14th 2009

trinidadexpress

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International