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