It is inexplicable that legislators once again failed to pass the Human Rights Commission Act this month.
Various versions of the bill have been tabled in the House of Assembly over the past decade following public consultations that kicked off in 2009. Yet each time it comes up for debate, some legislators act as though they’ve never seen it before, and they eventually kick it down the road.
Their amnesia is disingenuous at best, and it begs a question: What are they afraid of?
Premier Dr. Orlando Smith and some of his government colleagues rightly argued strongly for the law during a public debate last week in the HOA.
Other legislators hemmed and hawed, expressing reservations that at times seemed designed to score political points rather than to foster productive dialogue.
Opposition Leader Andrew Fahie and his colleague Julian Fraser, for example, implied that Virgin Islanders would lose out to expatriates if the law were passed.
This thinking is wrongheaded. Everyone in the Virgin Islands stands to benefit from a Human Rights Commission, which would help protect the rights enshrined in the 2007 Constitution.
Given the importance of this function, we see no reason for further delay, although legislators including Messrs. Fahie and Fraser were right to point out that the act, like any law, needs to be carefully reviewed in order to ensure that it is sound before it passes. That said, this review should have come long ago, and elected leaders have put forward no reasonable justification for why the bill has been delayed for about a decade.
Meanwhile, it seems to us that the only people who stand to benefit from further delays are community members who unethically benefit from rights abuses by exploiting employees or other vulnerable residents. We certainly hope that the law’s critics are not pandering to this disreputable contingent.
Last week, the HOA voted to send the bill to a select committee for review. Though this step smacks of yet another delay tactic, we hope that committee members will expeditiously and thoroughly evaluate the legislation and return it to the HOA as quickly as possible.
While they’re at it, they should revise the section of the bill that appears to prohibit the commission from proceeding with an investigation without the consent of all parties involved. This clause, we believe, threatens to make the commission toothless.
In the meantime, Dr. Smith should announce a deadline and insist that the committee bring the bill back to the HOA in time to pass it before the end of the year.
Legislators’ continued reluctance to adopt basic rights protections — the likes of which have long been standard practice in other developed countries around the world — is extremely troubling.
As we have argued before, human rights are too important to be treated as a political football.