Random thoughts on setting up of constitutional reform consultation

PROF WINSTON HE SUITE

SEVERAL GROUPS of people have made submissions to the two previous national consultations on constitutional reform. One can easily reduce the focus of these groups into three issue areas.

The first group of enthusiasts can be described as the grievance group, since their focus or obsession seemed to be confined to seizing the opportunity to raise all the possible grievances they had accumulated over the years since we had attained independence in 1962, not necessarily related to the existing constitutions or constitution-related matters. I will not attempt to list these grievances except to say that they represented significant grievances and dissatisfactions with where we have arrived since independence and the various failures and disappointments of the citizenry at large.

The second group I describe is the group of politicians since their focus was confined to political matters. This group consisted mainly of people whose focus was on electoral reform rather than constitutional reform. In fact, their call was for electoral reform before any constitutional reform. They were of the opinion that our focus at that juncture should have been on electoral reform and not constitutional reform. They were more or less satisfied with the existing Constitution but proposed that our focus should be reform to our previous for local and general electoral provisions.

These were the group of lawyers and politicians. They were satisfied with the section in the Constitution that treated with the listing of fundamental rights and freedoms similar to those found in the American constitution.

The third group, however, was concerned with more structural changes to our existing Republican Constitution. They sought to describe what they considered to be weaknesses or omissions in the provisions of the existing Constitution and our laws. They called for a focus on fundamental rights and freedoms. They called for the expansion of the listing of fundamental rights to include disadvantaged groups such as children, women and the mentally and physically challenged, and felt that the provisions in the Constitutions and law must treat with LGBTQ rights and the rights of people with disabilities and the elderly.

Our Constitution is silent with respect to a wide group of citizens whom we treat as invisible. This group sought to address what some may describe as more fundamental changes to our existing Constitution and changes in the society’s modus operandi. Their views were considered by the members of the earlier constitution commissions as being too radical.

They never responded to the submissions of these groups in their summary conclusions or their listing of recommendations for change. They were in fact dismissed as simply being socialists, communists, or even anarchists, any of these labels that would describe them as too far left, labels that would describe them as alien and offering foreign and inappropriate changes, borrowed from outside and unworkable in our Caribbean environment.

They sought to treat in the context of the Constitution, the structure and operation of national economics and the ownership of the national resources, the wealth of the nation and the question of the role of the State and the distribution of the wealth generated in and by the society.

These groups called for a radical restructuring of the Parliament and a wider representation of the citizenry and of community groups. They raised the question of poverty and other issues which were considered at the time not workable or alien to our culture, history and political environment.

Neither the Wooding Constitution Commission of 1973 nor the Hyatali Constitution Commission of 1976, which gave us our Republican Constitution, left us satisfied or attempted to fill these voids. These two consultations did not yield satisfaction since they left many fundamental issues unaltered.

They did not satisfactorily deal with the question of the First Peoples and their fundamental rights and freedoms. They did not deal with the special issue in relation to the question of the fundamental rights and freedoms of the descendants of the African slaves of the transatlantic slave trade.

Both constitution commissions failed to address these as central issues. They failed to treat with the question of rights to distribution of lands for these two groups of people.

They both failed to treat with the question of reparation as it pertained to the obligations of the European governments, especially of the government of Great Britain, for the period of enslavement of the First Peoples and the return of their lands and of the African slaves and of the distribution of lands after their emancipation in 1834 to 1838.

They again failed to consider the distribution of land to the descendants of the African slave trade on the occasion of independence (1962). They failed to deal with the unequal distribution of wealth and growing alienation in the society. They failed to deal with the rights of gay, homosexual and lesbian citizens as they are considered as criminals up to the present. They failed to deal with the question of poverty as we witness the growth in vagrancy, street dwellers, squatter communities of ghettoes and homelessness.

Some may however say that I still have every reason to be optimistic that this present constitution consultation will address and correct some of these omissions. I am not, after my experience with the two previous consultations.

Today we are reminded that independence and republican status have given us quite a bit to celebrate:

(a) We have our national flag

(b) We have our national anthem

(c) We have our national bird (we in fact have two)

(d) We have our national flower

(e) We have our coat of arms

(f) We have our national university

(g) We have our national airline

(h) We now have our national musical instrument

(i) We print our own currency

(j) We have our own head of state, the President

(k) We issue/print our own stamps

(l) We have our national orchestra

Yet 190 years after emancipation in 1834, 62 years after independence, 48 years after we were granted republican status, we still cannot make the decision to cut from the British Privy Council, the true and final symbol of legal and political independence. This is the greatest indictment because it confirms that we neither want nor have true independence. The opposition party, the UNC, consistently withheld its support for this move. We are still a colonised people. That is the reality.

This is why I am not optimistic with this constitutional commission/consultation. This is an indictment of who and what we are, what we want to be, a colonised people at heart. We are afraid of being a single people, a single nation.

This is why I have reluctantly taken to paper in the full knowledge that I will displease many and that we remain bounded by our limited vision of ourselves as citizens of an independent nation and state.

The 53rd anniversary of the 1970 Black Power Revolution coincides with the staging of this the third national constitution consultation. However, the consultation must seriously address the question of human rights and fundamental freedoms of all of citizens, but especially of the dispossessed.

We have to do better than we have done in the past and as we are doing in the present. We have to deal with the fact that the national wealth created after independence, and more specifically after republican status in 1976, has been disproportionately appropriated by the top ten percentage of the population. The allocation of the national wealth, especially flowing to the African segment of the population and the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, especially from the petroleum revenues, has shrunk progressively.

The vulgarity of this allocation is being displayed as if to laugh at this segment of the population. The growing inequality in the society is being displayed as if to taunt the dispossessed. We are confronted each day by the growing group of street vagrants, even in rural communities where none existed in 1962. We are confronted by the growing number of violent crimes, especially murder, greater than what existed in 1962 or even 1970.

Above all, we appear as a society powerless to deal with these national scourges. Piecemeal efforts have discouraged even the most hopeful. This is the central challenge to a free society that can break the spirit to those with the greatest faith.

It is difficult for me, a member of this group of the descendants of the transatlantic slave trade, to have much hope that this third constitution commission will hold out much promise for positive change.

Prof Winston HE Suite attended several of the constitution commission consultations that were organised by both the Wooding and the Hyatali Constitution Commissions