The Tribune

A WORKSHOP designed to help protect the rights of Bahamian children and persons with disabilities was recently held.

The event brought together United Nations officials and government agencies which make up the National Reporting Cooperation Mechanism.

The mechanism is chaired by the Office of the Attorney General and Ministry of Legal Affairs.

George Abualzulof, senior human rights advisor for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, trained participants on the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

In a press release, organisers said: “By facilitating the workshop, the inter-ministerial human rights committee is in a better position to provide timely submissions of the CRC and CRPD reports to the United Nations. The last review, before the committee, was in 2005 at which time, the report was ten years after the due date.

“The 5th and 6th report on the CRC from the Bahamas was to be submitted in 2012; and the CRPD in 2017. Both are expected to be submitted by the Bahamas Government this year.”

Jewel Major, assistant director of legal affairs, and leading attorney for the National Reporting Cooperation Mechanism, said the country’s legal system requires the transformation of international conventions into domestic law to render them applicable.

“In a small state with limited resources,” she explained, “this can pose serious obstacles to the effective and efficient domestication of international human rights.”

“Nevertheless, the government is committed to this process and is determined to improve the domestication of such instruments. This was done with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was domesticated in the Child Protection Act; and the Hague International Child Abduction Convention in the International Child Abduction Act.”

“Hence, the reason that we are now, due to failure of two referendum, have a draft Nationality Act 2021, that will give a mother married to a foreigner, the legal right to confer her nationality to her children.”

She said that as a nation, “our greatest assets are our people and the most vulnerable are our children and persons with disabilities”. For this reason, she called the workshop “extremely helpful”.