The Tribune

AFTER holding seven people in detention for nearly two years, it turns out that the government couldn’t even explaining why they had done so.

It’s a travesty of justice, and not the first when it comes to the government’s handling of immigration matters.

The seven arrived as asylum seekers from Cameroon, having fled over fear of persecution. Rather than a helping hand, they found the door being closed behind them at Carmichael Road Detention Centre in May 2019.

Fred Smith, QC, took up the case and the government was ordered to prove it acted lawfully in locking up the asylum seekers. When the deadline for that proof arrived, it turned out it was never filed by the government and it was revealed that instead the government has made arrangements to release the refugees.

That means they were deprived of their liberty for nothing. For a whim on the part of the immigration service. And this for people who were fleeing hostile conditions elsewhere.

Indeed, what they found here was a horrific experience, with one of the asylum seekers saying of the conditions they were kept in: “I really didn’t believe that in a country like The Bahamas you could experience so much cruelty. It was a systematic cruelty abuse of all sorts.”

One of the asylum seekers is a mother who was separated from her daughter, now three years old, for a year. That’s time you can’t give back to someone.

The voices of the asylum seekers reinforce some of the concerns in the US State Department report on human rights in The Bahamas, which raised alarms over the treatment of detainees at the Carmichael Road centre.

And the failure of the process – again – echoes the cases of Douglas Ngumi, who was locked up for six and a half years before being awarded more than $600,000 in damages. Or Matthew Sewell, who was locked up for more than nine years despite never being convicted of a single crime. Or Atain Takitota, who was locked up for nothing more than being a homeless foreigner and spent eight years behind bars at Fox Hill where he tried to kill himself three times only to be awarded at first a mere $1,000 in damages when his imprisonment was deemed unconstitutional.

Time and again, The Tribune has highlighted these cases. And time and again, thankfully, lawyers such as Fred Smith hold the government to account and win the freedom of those who should not be behind bars in the first place.

In November, we asked in this column when will one of these cases prompt the discussion about a fundamental change in the way we deal with long-term detention without charge.

That call was prompted by the case against Mr Ngumi. We repeat that call in the wake of these asylum seekers.

We cannot keep depriving people of their liberty for years without their cases being heard. Over and over, it is being shown in the courts to be wrong. When will we stop it happening in the first place?

People cannot get years of their lives back, and merely releasing them without even an apology is no measure of justice.

We must do better.

Blood clots

The concern about the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and its link with blood clots has not quite gone away.

Let’s talk about numbers, though. Around 34 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been administered, and more by the day, and a very small number of cases have seen blood clots develop. As Dr Nikkiah Forbes says, it’s around 0.0065 percent of cases. But the numbers don’t stop there. Around four in 10,000 women on the birth control pill also get blood clots. COVID-19 itself can cause blood clots.

So while the medical community is rightly investigating what’s going on, we shouldn’t exaggerate the concerns.

Dr Forbes believes that taking the vaccine far outweighs the risks. We agree.