MINISTER of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Senator Kamina Johnson Smith says incorrect statements on the proposed controlled re-entry order for Jamaicans abroad have been “unhelpful” to the process of establishing a protocol for Jamaicans wishing to return home.

“I am asking persons of influence to await the official information; if they do not understand legal language — and I don’t mean that with any sense of arrogance at all — I mean it in the sense that if you read and you are not quite clear and you are [have] an opportunity to seek some guidance, please seek it because the anxiety that our people are experiencing is really quite acute,” the minister said in the Senate, yesterday.

In what appeared to be a response to statements from the Opposition about the new developing process, she said:

“The most basic rule of statutory interpretation is that a document must be taken as a whole. That is fundamental and across the board, and if you are a legislator who has served for any length of time you should understand that. The publishing of an order and then explaining it in a way which is incorrect is unhelpful. If you do not understand, then ask. But what was done, I think, really created more difficulties than were necessary.”

The minister suggested the public should await a full explanation of the controlled re-entry order from the prime minister on Monday.

She was closing the debate on the 90-day extension of four current states of public emergency across the island. The Senate approved the extension with 18 votes in favour and with two absentees. The extensions were approved by the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

“We have done a lot of work on the end-to-end protocol, of which we have spoken on more than one occasion. We have had an opportunity, and I will just call it an opportunity, because the Government of Antigua reached out to ask for landing authorisation for a flight which they were sending, which they chartered to send for approximately 60 of their students who are here,” she told the Senate.

She said that in agreeing to the request, the Government had sought to have 20 Jamaicans stranded in Antigua and Barbuda.

“So, we had a list of persons that we asked whether they could be accommodated on that flight coming in, and what we did, because of the timing that request was just made a few days, is that we sought to use it as a pilot to test the new process which is in place and what is excellent is that 17 of the 20 used the process absolutely seamlessly,” she said.