KINGSTON, Jamaica–Opposition Spokesman on Youth and Human Rights, Isat Buchanan, says the evidence does not support the claim by the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Delroy Chuck, that Jamaica does not have a human rights problem.

Chuck made the claim earlier this month during his contribution to the Sectoral Debate in the House of Representatives.

During his contribution to the debate on Tuesday, Buchanan noted that Chuck went as far as to state that anyone who claims they need justice in Jamaica needs to have their head examined.

“I say this without relish: the minister who holds both justice and the constitution in his charge ought to be the last in this House to pronounce a nation’s rights beyond reproach,” Buchanan said.

“The claim does not survive contact with the evidence — and not the Opposition’s evidence, but the sober findings of independent and international monitors,” Buchanan added.

The first-term member of parliament for Portland Eastern told the House to consider the most recent United States State Department Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Jamaica.

“It records credible reports of arbitrary and unlawful killings and of arbitrary arrest and detention, and it finds that the Government did not always take credible steps to identify and punish the officials responsible,” he said.

“As of early September of last year, it counted 111 fatalities involving the security forces — more than the year before — and in the same period, the Independent Commission of Investigations 709 complaints of police abuse, most alleging intimidation, excessive force in restraint, and the denial of medical care,” Buchanan continued.

He declared that, “these are not the statistics of a country with no human rights problems”. He also pointed out that the same body of reporting describes lock-ups meant to hold a person for 48 hours holding them instead for weeks, months and even years, without charge. Some, he noted, are incarcerated with no paperwork at all, “so that, long afterwards, no one could say why they had been taken [into custody]”.

Buchanan also noted that the report describes more than one hundred individuals with mental illness who were found unfit to plead, held indefinitely and were neither tried nor freed.

“It describes our two oldest correctional facilities, raised in 1714 and 1845, holding as much as three times their intended number, in conditions earlier reports did not hesitate to call harsh and life-threatening.

“The minister asks whether the citizen who seeks justice needs his head examined. I ask, with respect, whether the one who makes the claim is the one that needs examining,” said Buchanan.

Addressing Chuck directly, he quoted a famous line from his famous father Big Youth: “No gwaan so Chucky no gwaan so, because you know that Chucky no lucky”. Chuck could be seen in the chamber with an uncomfortable half-smile on his face.

Big Youth, who was in the visitor’s gallery, rose to his feet with a grin on his face that declared his appreciation of his son’s comments. Of note is that visitors to the Parliament are forbidden from clapping or doing anything that disturbs the proceedings.

Buchanan, a noted attorney-at-law, pointed out that the minister’s entire answer to this catalogue was a single institution: ‘go, he said, to the Office of the Public Defender’. “Yet the minister knows, or ought to know, the limits of the very remedy he offers”.

Buchanan noted that by law, that office cannot appear in court; it may only retain attorneys to act for those it assists. “And this Parliament may lawfully disregard its findings and decline to act on its recommendations”.

“A remedy that cannot enter the courtroom, and whose conclusions the State may shelve at will, is not proof that our rights are secure; it is a measure of how exposed they are. To direct the citizen to that door and declare the matter closed is to mistake the existence of a door for the safety of the house,” Buchanan remarked.

“Nor can the health of a nation’s rights be read from the number of complaints that reach that office,” he added.

-Lynford Simpson