The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

GRAND Bahama Human Rights Association President Fred Smith has written an open letter to Prime Minister Perry Christie, asking him to intervene with respect to Foreign Affairs and Immigration Minister Fred Mitchell and his “increasingly drastic and extremist utterances”.

He also asked Mr Christie to intervene in the “growing debacle that is the Department of Immigration’s iron-fisted and unconstitutional new enforcement policy”.

Mr Smith’s comment’s came after Mr Mitchell said Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade must investigate the lawyer’s “criminally libelous” comparison of the conditions at the Carmichael Road Detention Centre to Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp.

In his letter, Mr Smith warned that the Bahamas is “on the slippery slope to dictatorship” and expressed concern about the personal attacks Mr Mitchell has launched toward him through the press.

Mr Smith lamented what he said was Mr Mitchell’s slide from a once “fearless civil rights activist” to one whose outlook has become “calculating and cynical.”

He suggested that Mr Mitchell is willing to “force ethnic tensions and divisions on a scale previously unknown.”

He said: “...the Grand Bahama Human Rights Association is alarmed over Mitchell’s threat of bringing criminal libel charges against myself and GBHRA vice-president Joseph Darville, along with his ominous declaration that ‘the commissioner of police must investigate what the GBHRA mean by their remarks’.

“The statement to which the minister refers concerns the testimonials of several detainees housed in the Carmichael Road Detention Centre about the harsh, unsanitary and inhumane conditions they were forced to endure.

“If Minister Mitchell wishes to dispel these characterisations, he need only allow the GBHRA and other human rights groups to tour the facility and view the conditions firsthand.

“Instead, he has sought to use the threat of police action and indeed imprisonment in an attempt to intimidate those he views as opponents – and silence the alleged victims of mistreatment, neglect and physical abuse. In broadcasting his injunction to Commissioner Greenslade over the government’s news network, the minister has also placed undue pressure on the police force, in a manner that threatens to compromise the fair and impartial enforcement of the law.”

He later added: “As you know, the use of law enforcement as a weapon to achieve political aims through intimidation or worse, has been a hallmark of brutal and authoritarian regimes throughout history.

“This, coupled with Mitchell’s recent threat to annul the citizenship of Bahamians who hold opinions with which he disagrees, constitutes an extremely serious challenge to the fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the Bahamas Constitution.

“I submit to you Mr Prime Minister that your Cabinet colleague’s actions have placed us on the slippery slope to dictatorship.”

• The letter to the Prime Minister is published in the Letters column on page 4.