Susan Smith, Staff Reporter
CARICOM REPRESENTATIVES have suggested that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) intervene to curtail the massive deportation of residents from foreign nations to the Caribbean.
Since January, Jamaica alone accounts for more than 2,500 deportees to the region, according to local police statistics.
Describing the practice as a violation of human rights and a catalyst for transnational crimes, representatives from Caribbean member-countries of the Organisation of American States (OAS) said a study should be done on the impact deportation has on crime in the Caribbean.
INFORMAL BREAKFAST MEETING
The representatives were speaking at an informal breakfast meeting with Caribbean ambassadors and the IACHR at its secretariat in Washington, D.C. recently.
The meeting aimed at discussing ways of strengthening the relationship between the IACHR and the Caribbean member-states of the OAS. But before delving into any systematic approach on how this could be achieved, the burning concerns of deportation came up.
"I would like to extrapolate the role of the commission on the issue of deportation," stated H. Dennis Antoine, Grenada's Ambassador to the United States, who felt that the subject was not a traditional area targeted by the regional organisation.
"The rights of Caribbean people are being trampled on. It's not right to take people with ties in a particular country and make them a nobody," interjected Ambassador for St. Kitts and Nevis, Isben Williams.
He said some of the thousands of people whose rights have been encroached upon ultimately disable the countries which sent them back. Moreover, he said deportation had serious implications for transnational crime.
"It's a hemispheric problem where one country has taken action for its benefit which has affected the hemisphere," Jamaica's Ambassador to the U.S., Gordon Shirley, added, urging the region not to look at the situation in isolation.
RIGHT TO DEPORT
In agreement with her colleagues, Belize's Ambassador, Lisa Shoman, added that every state had a right to deport people but that the Caribbean was thinking of approaching the issue through the OAS.
She argued that "if you send some persons in a new environment where they are destabilised, it sends them into shock".
Executive member of the secretariat to the IACHR and special rapporteur for Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. José Zalaquett, said the issue of deportation was a new and emerging problem which had grown to become a massive one.
He explained that with no direct method to tackle that specific problem, the use of the right to a fair hearing and due process was a possible approach.
