Modified electoral laws being drafted

Recommendations for new laws governing the island’s electoral process are now before the Chief Parliamentary Counsel for drafting.

However, Chairman of the Electoral and Boundaries Commission (EBC) Leslie Haynes, QC revealed on Tuesday that none of those recommendations relate to any of the issues arising from the January 19, 2022 general elections.

On the eve of the election, the Barbados Sovereign Party’s Philip Nathanial Catlyn filed an application for an injunction to stop the polls from going ahead on the grounds that more than 5,000 COVID-19 patients were being denied their constitutional right to vote.

Catlyn claimed that the exclusion of COVID-19 positive citizens from the election was in breach of Section 6 of the Representation of the People Act which enshrines the right of eligible residents and citizens to vote.

Justice Cicely Chase had ruled that the court had no jurisdiction to hear an injunction to stop the general election, pointing out that the application was incorrectly filed as it ought to have been brought before an election court.

“In respect of the recent elections . . . this COVID thing . . . I only received the box-by-box results last week Thursday. So we will soon start meetings again and we will look at the election and we will look and see how we can do things better and improve in certain areas,” Haynes told Barbados TODAY on Tuesday.

“We have been working on the laws for a long time and . . . what we have been working on does not yet include any review of these elections, but we will do so within the coming months.

“We make changes to the laws all the time. We have a number of changes coming. You would have heard of the Barbados Identity Authority and Management, and then we are going to have a centre to get things in order. In terms of laws and bringing them up-to-date and amending them, we have been working on that process for the last three years. It is now out of our hands. Those laws are now with the Chief Parliamentary Counsel,” he added.

Haynes said he expects the Identity Management Authority to be up and running in another two to three years.

He pointed out that the responsibility of death certificates and birth certificates would be removed from the Registry of the Supreme Court of Barbados and placed under the jurisdiction of the Authority.

“We at the Electoral Commission, if we have an Identity Management Authority, that Authority would be responsible for birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, that type of thing so that it would be easier for the EBC to keep track of who is born or when they reach 16 or 18, you write them a letter and tell them come in and get their ID card or whatever. It would be easier for us to track if we move those things out of the Supreme Court and have an Identity Authority. So, that’s coming,” the senior counsel explained.

Haynes disclosed that changes are also in the works to address the issue of Commonwealth residents in Barbados voting.

“We have also recommended that CARICOM [Caribbean Community] nationals . . . . Remember, not all CARICOM nationals are Commonwealth citizens; for instance, Suriname belong to the CARICOM but Surinamese are not Commonwealth citizens. So we have recommended that CARICOM citizens be put on the same level as Commonwealth citizens,” he said.

“The CARICOM community, as far as I am concerned, should come before Commonwealth citizens; but we have put them on the same level. So, that’s where we are, that’s another change that’s going to come,” the EBC chief said.

Back in February 2018, at least 14 Commonwealth nationals resident in Barbados went to court in a last-ditch effort to have their names included in the voters’ list to be used in the May 24 general elections here.

The details of the court action had not been made public at the time but the attorneys representing the Commonwealth citizens resident in Barbados had called for Chief Electoral Officer Angela Taylor to have their clients registered ahead of the polls, in keeping with a ruling by the Trinidad-headquartered Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).

In their May 16, 2018 letter to Taylor, the attorneys asserted that they were in possession of the CCJ ruling that endorsed the ruling of the Barbados Chief Justice “that your longstanding policy was ultra vires and unlawful, but also pronounced that you have an obligation, once an applicant satisfies the criteria for registration under section 7 and the formal requirements under the Act and Regulations, to register that applicant”.

The CCJ ruled that St Lucian-born Eddy Ventose, a professor of law at The Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), should be registered as an elector to cast a ballot in the May 24 general elections. emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb