The Tribune

By RICARDO WELLS

Tribune Staff Reporter

rwells@tribunemedia.net

SAVE The Bays (STB) Chairman Joseph Darville has written to three of the largest international advocacy agencies in an effort to bring global attention to the “deplorable treatment” of environmental advocates in the Bahamas by the Christie administration.

In an open letter released to the press on Monday, Mr Darville said there were further efforts by the state to intimidate and threaten activists in The Bahamas over the past year and half.

Mr Darville, in the letter addressed to Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International and the Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights, said the more recent attacks have taken on a more personal formant.

“The state, for its part, has failed to take action against developers who engage in unregulated development and has instead become increasingly hostile towards environmental advocates and their supporters,” he wrote.

Mr Darville detailed a number of recent occurrences in The Bahamas, including attacks by sitting MPs on STB members, accusations that STB concocted a plot to “destabilise the government” and threats of prosecution levelled at STB members for their work.

“Their private emails have been accessed and read aloud in Parliament by senior members of the government in an attempt to generate public hostility toward the group,” wrote Mr Darville.

“In the latest and most egregious attack, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Immigration Fred Mitchell threatened to have STB’s legal director, Fred Smith, imprisoned for ‘contempt of Parliament.’”

“It is noteworthy that this is the second time Minister Mitchell has threatened Mr Smith with imprisonment. In the first, Mitchell claimed that in his capacity as president of the Grand Bahama Human Rights Association (GBHRA) Smith was guilty of ‘criminal libel,’ a draconian and anachronistic charge which is considered obsolete in most democratic countries.”

Mr Darville said the activist community in The Bahamas has grown increasingly apprehensive in the face of the heightened and sustained animosity on the part of the Christie administration.

He stated that many activists have “very real fears for their safety and liberty.” Mr Darville added: “The atmosphere for advocacy in the country has never been more bleak.”

Mr Darville urged the groups to do “any and everything in its power” to bring attention to the “rapidly deteriorating situation”.

According to Mr Darville, international scrutiny is the only check that may “restrain increasingly hostile state actors before the situation spirals completely out of control”.

STB has come under fire by members of the Christie administration after court documents filed by the group alleged that Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard employed two “gang members” to carry out crimes against those who opposed further development at Nygard Cay.

On March 9, four STB directors - Mr Darville, Romi Ferreira, Mr Smith and Louis Bacon - and Rev CB Moss, who is not a STB member, filed an affidavit by Florida investigator John Joseph DiPaolo detailing Mr Nygard’s connection to Livingston “Toggie” Bullard and Wisler “Bobo” Davilma, the two men in question.

In recent weeks, members of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) have attempted to portray STB as a political faction disguised as an environmental group. Education Minister Jerome Fitzgerald described STB as a an organisation that purports to have one function when in fact it has political motivations, reading emails from members of the group in the House of Assembly to further his point.