Government Officials Respond to Constitution Report Criticism

On Monday, a group of former commissioners from the People’s Constitution Commission broke its silence, raising serious red flags about the final draft of a report that was handed over to Prime Minister John Briceño. In a strongly worded letter to the PM, the group outlines a series of concerns — from poor record-keeping and questionable procedures, to what they call a misuse of the ‘consensus principle,’ which they argue has no legal basis. Even more troubling, they claim that not all commissioners had access to the full report and that many never approved it. Since then, Dr. Louis Zabaneh, the current minister in charge of constitutional affairs, has responded to the backlash. And earlier today, his predecessor, Henry Charles Usher, also weighed in. He didn’t hold back, saying the commissioners who are now speaking out simply didn’t understand what their role was in the process.

 

Henry Charles Usher, Minister of Public Service

“First, I’m happy to see that there was a report prepared with a hundred and sixty-seven recommendations. It was delivered to the prime minister and now that, with the amendment that we are attempting to get through to increase the time, we have to look at those one hundred and sixty-seven recommendations. Remember, this initiative called the People’s Constitution Commission was to hear the views of the people, was to hear the views of the Belizean people at home and abroad because it actually had an opportunity to reach out to the diaspora. It wasn’t necessarily to hear the views of the commissioners. And that’s what they were told from the very beginning, “your views, your personal opinions, you have to put aside.  You are merely a conduit for the people to talk to the government. The views, the opinions, the passion projects of the commissioners, were not supposed to be in that report. If they wanted it to be in the report, they should have had somebody in the public raise it at one of the consultations. But at the last minute, or at any part of the process, your job was not to say, “Oh, I want this in the report. I think this should be in the report.” No. If it was not raised in any of the consultations with the people, then it should not be in the report.”