The Tribune

AT THE start of May, a major ruling was handed down by the Privy Council on citizenship.

The ruling affirmed a previous ruling by Chief Justice Ian Winder – made in 2020 – that children born out of wedlock to Bahamian men are citizens at birth regardless of their mother’s nationality.

The word landmark is sometimes overused, but for the people affected by this ruling, it was perfectly appropriate.

The plaintiff in the case, Shannon Rolle, talked in 2021 of the difficulties that people face when they cannot get a passport. He said: “Some people turn into murderers and thieves when they find out how hard it is to get a passport when in this situation. You can’t even get a McDonald’s job without a passport.”

The written ruling on the matter said: “Bahamian citizenship is an important and fundamental right and the provisions governing entitlement to citizenship are rightly entrenched in the constitution.”

Consider those words for a moment – an important and fundamental right. Not a privilege, but a right.

Several months on from that ruling, we seem to be in a position where the government is still trying to figure out who gets that right.

Paternity testing seems to have become central to the government’s considerations of how citizenship is evaluated.

And while the government figures out how to apply that process, months are passing – and what happens to those who wish to avail themselves of the right that has been asserted by the court?

Indeed, we now find ourselves in a situation where it seems that only one particular category of people – those born to Bahamian men out of wedlock to a foreign mother – find themselves perhaps having to prove the DNA link to their father.

Now some may say that it is the way to prove the connection – but if so, should that not apply to everyone?

Fraud is one concern. As Health Minister Dr Michael Darville himself says: “If a mother has three children, two may be biologically mine, and the last one may not be mine. The mother wants citizenship for the child, and she has that right once the child can be confirmed as mine, so rather than the blood sample being taken from the one that is in question, the blood sample may be taken from the one that is mine, and so the DNA report that will come, because it matches my DNA to the child’s DNA, it will say with 99 percent certainty that it’s mine. The question is, do we have the right sample?”

That is true – but who is to say a child said to have been born to two Bahamians indeed has that parentage. There are many children born to fathers who are not the husband.

So if we cannot trust what it says on the birth certificate – where indeed it does say – for those born in these specific circumstances, why can we trust what it says for everyone else?

More pertinently, knowing that this ruling was in the works since 2020, should the plan of action not have been in place already in case the Privy Council ruled in this fashion?

Now we have citizens in limbo – who are entitled to their citizenship, but who must wait while the government works out how to affirm it.

How long can a Bahamian be denied their right to citizenship before it becomes a scandal? Ten years? Five? A year? A month? A week? A day?

This has all the makings of another court case for anyone denied by a decision on their citizenship or by the delay in such a decision.

There should have been a plan, but in the absence of one, there needs to be one as a priority – and one that does not treat one citizen any differently from any other.

Resolving that particular conundrum may be a challenge for the government – but it is not as if there was not time to prepare.