KINGSTON, Jamaica — Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport, Olivia Grange, has congratulated Professor of Social History at the University of the West Indies (UWI) Verene Shepherd, on her appointment as Chairman of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights.

CERD is an organ of the United Nation’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Shepherd’s appointment as chairman was done during the committee’s 106th Session which opened in Geneva on Monday.

“I commend Professor Shepherd for yet another milestone, not just as a Jamaican and a historian, but as a woman, who continues to break glass ceilings the world over. She is now serving a second term on the CERD, after having yet again received the highest number of votes,” Grange said in a statement on Tuesday.

“I recall when, in 2019, I made the recommendation to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Senator the Honourable Kamina Johnson Smith, to support Professor’s candidature to the Committee. I am proud to say that Professor Shepherd has since advanced to become the focal point on CERD for Non-Self-Governing Territories on the UN Special Committee on Decolonisation.

“As minister with responsibility for the gender portfolio, I recognise that, coming as it does when we celebrate our 60th year of Independence, and during the UN Decade for People of African Descent, Professor Shepherd’s elevation is testament to the limitless capacities of our Jamaican women,” she continued.

Professor Shepherd is one of the world’s leading historians, a pre-eminent scholar and a gender advocate who has several publications to her name including Introduction to Reparation for Secondary Schools; Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica, 1845-1950; Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspectives, (co-edited by Barbara Bailey and Bridget Brereton); and Livestock, Sugar & Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (2009).

Shepherd has previously served as Chairman of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, the Jamaica Bi-Centenary Committee to Commemorate the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans, Chairman of the National Council for Reparation which operates out of the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport.