Dionne Rose, Staff Reporter

Diaspora mini-conference workshop groups in Florida, earlier this year. - Contributed

Members of the Jamaican Diaspora want the Jamaican Constitution to be amended to allow persons with dual citizenship to participate in political representation.

Irwine Clare, a Jamaican-born director of the Queens-based, non-profit Caribbean Immigrant Services in New York, told The Sunday Gleaner that Section 41 (2) of the Constitution must be revisited.

"If I were to come to Jamaica tomorrow and make myself available for representational politics ... from what I understand from the Constitution, I (would) have to denounce my (U.S. citizenship). That is something that is not going to find favour in the diaspora," he said.

Clare said that it was for the leaders of the land and those who were versed in constitutional law to come up with a situation, which allows for Jamaicans, whether or not they have become citizens of other countries, to be facilitated in the process of representational politics.

Unfair Constitution

"The fact that I am a U.S. citizen, (with Jamaican nationality) this should not preclude me from putting myself up for representational politics," he pointed out.

Agreeing with Clare, Jamaican-born attorney-at-law in Florida, Dahlia Walker-Huntington, said that Section 41(2) of the Constitution was unfair to Jamaicans living in the diaspora.

Inequity

She pointed out that there was inequity in the Constitution as it allows a person who gains dual citizenship through their parents, as a child, to be able to participate in representational politics, but at the same time bars another person who swears allegiance to another country from participating in representational politics.

"It (the Constitution) is treating half of your population unfairly," she argued.

Section 41 (2) of the Jamaican Constitution states: "No person shall be qualified to be appointed as a senator or elected as a member of the House of Representatives who is, by virtue of his own act, under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state."

At least two winning Jamaica Labour Party candidates in the September 3 general election, Daryl Vaz and Shahine Robinson, are facing challenges in the courts with regard to their eligibility to sit in Parliament, because of their alleged dual citizenship.

dionne.rose@gleanerjm.com.