GOVERNANCE
Scathing Assessment of Constitutional Reform Within Region Regional expert on constitutional governance and politics, Professor Cynthia Barrow-Giles has delivered a damning assessment of the overall reform process in the Caribbean.
I n her inaugural professorial lecture entitled Possibilities” delivered in March 2023, The UWI, Cave Hill academic said while there was general agreement that constitutions ought to be adjusted as societies evolve, the process to bring about the required changes was flawed. She critiqued the selection processes of some of the Constitutional Reform Commissions (CRCs) and stated there was a need to properly consider their leadership, the strictures under which they operate, and to ensure they were genuinely representative of the wider society. “Constitutional Reform in the Commonwealth Caribbean: Some Insights, Compromises and In some instances, she argued, constitutional reform was imposed by international organisations and Western governments, pointing to Guyana in 2000 as an example. Six of the post-2000 constitutional review processes in the Caribbean had stalled or failed and only two were successful, according to Professor Barrow-Giles, a Distinguished Senior Fellow attached to the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas . She said there were lessons to be learnt from those stalled and failed processes and agreed with the former chair of the Belize 1999 Political Reform Commission, Dr. Dylan Vernon , that “it ought not to be driven by the single issue of removing the monarchy from our existing political order” .
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