FINALLY, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) has found its voice on the cruel ruling by the Constitutional Court in the Dominican Republic on nationality, which will affect large numbers of individuals of Haitian descent.

The ruling effectively regards those persons who have entered the Dominican Republic since 1929, and their children born there, as “in transit” and, therefore, requires them to obtain nationality.

There’s no doubt that this law will now make stateless a lot of people — estimates run as high as 210,000 — born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian descent.

The upshot is that this new immigration status will create great hardship on the affected people. But, just as important is the fact that the ruling puts the Dominican Republic in violation of its obligations under international human rights agreements to which they are signatories.

Unfortunately, it took strong condemnation of this action from former Jamaican Prime Minister P J Patterson and current prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Dr Ralph Gonsalves for Caricom to say something about this issue. And even then, the regional grouping chose delicate language to state its position.

Now, while the Dominican Republic is not a Caricom state, the country has observer status in the grouping and is a member of Cariforum, which it constitutes along with the 15 members of the regional grouping. As such, the country interacts with regional leaders on a range of issues of mutual interest.

We suggest, therefore, that Caricom, despite its puny statement, advocate that strong international pressure be applied to the Dominican Republic, especially throughout the European Union, to have this law reversed.

Getting the attention of the international community should not prove difficult, given that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights have both seen it fit to tackle the court ruling, which Mr Patterson has correctly labelled “discriminatory legislation”.

Mr Patterson has told Caricom that, within this region, we have an obligation to speak out against inequity. We would take it a step further and say that the region has a duty to act.

Disregard for democracy

The leadership campaign in the Jamaica Labour Party is growing intense and more bile is coming out in the platform rhetoric.

While sharp commentary is par for the course on the hustings, the party should be careful that it doesn’t get to the stage where it cannot unite after the vote on November 10.

Proclaiming that a councillor cannot run in the next local government election if he doesn’t support his member of parliament’s choice for leader, as was stated at a pro-Andrew Holness meeting on Sunday, does not do the party any good.

Neither does removing a councillor from an MP’s constituency office for the same reason, as reported in today’s edition of this newspaper.

What both petty actions demonstrate is a disregard for individuals’ right to choose. Stop it!