Move quickly to entrench more human rights protections, lobbyist urges

The Jamaican Government is again being strongly encouraged to move swiftly to make the appropriate legislative changes to protect more human rights.

Human rights interests are agitating for the matter to be kept on the front burner of Parliament.

Rodje Malcolm, a director at the human rights advocacy organisation, Jamaicans for Justice, argues that the government can move the process along by taking some simple steps. These, he suggests, include strengthening institutions such as the Public Defender's Office.

“The courts will never be able to entrench the Public Defender or the Political (Ombudsman), both of which are under interim Acts since they were created,” he noted Monday on RJR’s Beyond the Headlines.

They are “interim,” he said, “because they literally say in the law, ‘We are creating this interim body until we entrench it in the Constitution,’ yet 17 years later, as the Public Defender said today, her body is still interim, awaiting inclusion in the Constitution.”

It was therefore important, he said, to commence “a serious process of constitutional reform” in 2018.