By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

AMENDMENTS to the Bahamas Nationality Act to expand automatic citizenship rights for children of Bahamians may retroactively apply for up to 17 years, Attorney General Carl Bethel said yesterday.

In a comprehensive address about citizenship to the Rotary Club of Southeast Nassau, Mr Bethel said while this number is not yet absolute, it is what he has recommended to those drafting an amendment to the law.

He expects that “scores, but not hundreds” of people will gain citizenship once the amendment is enacted.

“It’s very rather small the numbers,” he said at East Villa restaurant. “It’s not like you’re going to have masses and masses of newly created Bahamians coming from hither and yon.

“To prevent any harshness in terms of the category being children under 18, when the bill is drafted it will be my suggestion that it be made retroactive for up to 17 years so that a child in being is not disenfranchised. After the child in that circumstance turns 18, then the rigours of the Constitution and the law will apply. If you are over 18, bring your police record. Give up your past citizenship. Show that you are familiar with the Constitution, with the national anthem, with Bahamian symbols, etc.”

What convinces Mr Bethel that the administration is not running afoul of the Constitution is its position that the country’s founding fathers bestowed “quasi-constitutional significance” upon the Bahamas Nationality Act, creating it precisely to ensure children would not suffer because of the strict citizenship provisions in the Constitution.

And while the Bahamas Nationality Act already gives the government discretion to grant citizenship to whichever child it chooses, Mr Bethel said the administration’s chief motivation in pursuing amendments to the Act is to prevent political abuse that’s possible when the ability to bestow citizenship is discretionary.

“It’s a very, very simple amendment we will put forward,” he said.

The government will amend Section Six of the Bahamas Nationality Act, removing the words a “minister may at his discretion cause the minor child of a citizen of the Bahamas to be registered as a citizen of the Bahamas upon application” and replace this with the mandate that “the minister shall cause the minor child of a citizen of the Bahamas to be registered as a citizen of the Bahamas upon application.”

He explained: “Shall doesn’t always mean ‘must.’ It usually does [mean must] and it weighs in favour of granting but it doesn’t make it absolutely guaranteed. Nothing takes away the fundamental right of a minister at some point for very valid reasons to say no, but ‘shall’ will mean that the basic presumption is when the parent applies, the child gets to register as a Bahamian. We think that this is not a similar situation of putting something to the people and blatantly going against it. We are amending a document clearly designed to assist in the humane implementation of our nation’s Constitution and we think this is consistent with the intentions of the fathers of our Bahamian democracy.”

‘Abuse’

Addressing the importance of removing the government’s discretionary ability to grant citizenship to children, Mr Bethel recalled the Pindling-era and said some female supporters of the FNM whose children had legitimate claims to citizenship were victimised and told not to apply to the government “for your children to be made citizens by virtue of any ministerial decisions. If you want your children to be Bahamians, you got to adopt them.”

“That’s the evil that we are seeking to prevent from ever happening again,” Mr Bethel said. “The evil is this word discretion which in our living history has been prone to grotesque and oppressive abuse by politicians.”

Recalling the history of the Bahamas Nationality Act, Mr Bethel said: “The Bahamas Nationality Act was passed and assented to by the then governor, Sir John Paul, five days before independence. It was brought into full legal effect on the day of independence. It is clearly an Act that was passed with the provisions of the independence Constitution directly in mind. It is in reality a document of quasi-constitutional significance because it was clearly passed to go and be utilized in association with the soon-to-be brought into effect independence Constitution in order to formalize the ways in which that Constitution would be applied to all persons who would gain rights under the Constitution.

“In Section 6 of the Bahamas Nationality Act, there is a very interesting series of provisions. It is my contention…that those provisions in section six were clearly designed by the founding fathers of the Constitution through the Bahamas Nationality Act to have the ability to soften some of the provisions of the Constitution that they were clearly aware would have discriminatory or harmful effects on some segments of the population… Knowing that the very terms of the Constitution were bound to create hardship for the children of Bahamians and not wishing that to happen [Section 6 of the Act was created]. The clear intent of the Act in my submission is notwithstanding the rigours of the Constitution and the inherent sex based discrimination that is to be found in the Constitution, the children were not to suffer because of that discrimination. That was the intent of the founding fathers in these provisions.” 

Acknowledging that Bahamians have twice rejected referendums that sought to expand citizenship rights, Mr Bethel said “there is no equivalency” in what the Minnis administration is now doing and what the Christie administration did when it went against the results of the 2013 gambling referendum.

He said: “The former government put a straight forward question, yes or no, on a very simple issue: Do you want legalised gaming in web shops or do you not want it? The answer was no, the government said we’ll give it to you anyway. The issue of the equality to the treatment the children of Bahamians was part of a package in each case and so it’s difficult to determine whether the views and results of each referendum on that particular question was one directly related to the question or whether it was a result within a scenario of a package that was deemed unacceptable.”