The Tribune

THE Bahamas government’s new immigration policy could be leading to the creation of stateless people, a high-level meeting of regional and international non-governmental organisations has been told.

Paco Nunez, secretary of the Grand Bahama Human Rights Association (GBHRA), told the meeting – convened in Costa Rica to discuss strategies for ending statelessness in the Caribbean and around the world – that since November 1, 2014, persons under threat of summary deportation to Haiti have included those born in the Bahamas to Haitian parents, who are entitled to be registered as citizens upon application after their 18th birthday.

“With the recent abolition of the certificate of identity, these young people had no way of proving their right to be in the country,” Mr Nunez said. “The same goes for the many thousands who have applied according to the rules, but have had no response from the state, sometimes waiting for years. Meanwhile, the government has ramped up its detention and deportation exercises, declaring that all non-nationals must be able to produce proof of their right to be in the country upon demand.

“The state told all those born in the country to Haitian parents to apply for a Haitian passport, but for many, the obstacles to a successful application are prohibitive. In particular, many find it impossible to locate the documentary evidence necessary to establish their Haitian heritage, in the absence of which, the government of Haiti will not recognise their claim. So, following November 1, 2014, some of these people found themselves in the Bahamas with neither Bahamian nor Haitian documents and no way to get either. If deported to Haiti, we believe those individuals face a real chance of becoming stateless.”

Mr Nunez noted that eight months after enforcement was ramped up, the state said it began issuing belonger’s permits to those with a constitutional right to be registered as Bahamian citizens. However, one of the requirements for obtaining this document is a copy of a valid passport – the kind of document this category of vulnerable individuals may not have access to obtaining.

“Many of them are completely trapped. To avoid being deported before they can get a Bahamian passport, they need a belonger’s permit. But to get the permit, they need a Haitian passport, which many of them cannot meet the requirements to obtain,” he said.

Mr Nunez attended the meeting at the invitation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), one of the main organisers and a leading force in the effort to end statelessness around the world.

A stateless person is an individual who is not registered as a citizen of any country and has no clear path to becoming so registered. It is UNHCR’s position that every human being has a right to a nationality.

Also attending the meeting from the Bahamas was Marion Bethel, who represented Citizens for Constitutional Equality (CCE), an NGO that fights for gender equality in Bahamian law.

In a joint presentation, Mr Nunez and Ms Bethel spoke of the government’s repeated delay in bringing a referendum on amendments to correct several discriminatory clauses in the Bahamas’ Constitution. They also pointed out that the new immigration policy has exacerbated the negative consequences of this fundamental lack of legal equality, in particular with regard to the inability of Bahamian women in certain circumstances to pass on citizenship to their children, in ways that could heighten the risk of statelessness.

Several other speakers mentioned The Bahamas as a country of concern with regard to statelessness and other human rights issues in the region. These included Álvaro Botero Navarro, senior attorney with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an organ of the Organisation of American States (OAS).

Asked to explain how the commission could be used to improve the state of human rights in a country, Mr Botero used as an example the recent hearing in Washington, requested by the GBHRA.

Mr Botero said that although there had been internal unease for some time, the concerns of Bahamian civil society never made it to the level of the commission until the GBHRA began to focus on the issue. He noted that as a result, questions about the immigration policy were also raised in The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Washington Post and other publications.

As a result, he said, the Bahamas government sought advice from the IACHR on what they could do to avoid further denunciations in the future.

“No state wants to be known publicly as a violator of human rights, especially a small island state dependent on tourism,” Mr Botero said.

The meeting was attended by representatives of NGOs from more than 20 countries across the Americas, as well as officials of the UNHCR, the IACHR, the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and the Caribbean Institute for Human Rights (ICADH).