TWO members of the Constitutional Reform Committee (CRC) are adamant they will not be rubber-stamping the Government’s positions on matters relating to the work they are doing to refine Jamaica’s supreme law.

There have been some concerns within the public that the Andrew Holness Administration has an agenda as it moves towards reforming the constitution, with the committee appointed to ratify its decisions and give them legitimacy.

But committee members Dr Nadeen Spence and retired judge Hugh Small told this week’s Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange that they are building on the work done on this matter many years ago and on which there was broad agreement, therefore there is no need to start the process from scratch.

According to Small, while the Government has taken the initiative to bring the current stage of the constitutional reform to fruition, it is not just based on work of the present Administration.

“I don’t think we have to reinvent the wheel. And I think if we were going to try and reinvent the wheel and go back over and ignore all of the work that has been done in the last 60 years we would not be able to achieve the kind of progress that is now required and is now forced upon us, because we have been so slow in the past that we are about to have Queen Camilla [wife of Britain’s King Charles III]. Can you imagine that?” said Small.

While declaring that he will not be a part of a rubber stamp, Small stressed the present work of the committee builds on the pioneering work of people who came before, among them national heroes Marcus Garvey, Sam Sharpe, and George William Gordon.

“Those people helped to lift our consciousness and make us aware that we have this identity to proclaim ourselves to be the Jamaican people, the Jamaican nation, the Jamaican republic,” he said.

“We are very fortunate to have as one of our members Lloyd Barnett, who actually worked in the Attorney General’s Office on the legislation that went to England that became our first constitution. It was drafted here in Jamaica, and we are fortunate to have it. It is not a question of rubber-stamping or just reflecting anybody else’s point of view — that’s how nations grow,” added Small.

Expressing similar sentiments, Spence said there is a term of reference given to members of the committee which speaks to the process of the constitutional reform.

“What are some of the conversations that we had before? Where are we in the process? I was never of the idea that we were going to go at this from the beginning — of identifying the parts in the constitution that needed to be reformed and then having that conversation about reform,” said Spence.

“I was well aware that we had a committee set up in 1992 that did substantial work on identifying how the constitutional reform process should go, that the constitution itself lays out how the process should be undertaken,” added Spence.

In the meantime, Minister of Legal and Constitutional Affairs Marlene Malahoo Forte, who is the chair of the committee, told the Monday Exchange that somebody has to lead on the work, building on what was done before.

“The committee was presented with the terms of reference; given time to go through them, make the suggestions; and then those terms of reference were finalised by consensus — and included in the terms of reference was the indicative timeline,” said Forte.

The 15-member committee, which comprises members of the Government and Opposition, the attorney general, constitutional law and governance experts, and representatives of academia and civil society, is mandated to help guide the constitutional reform process throughout all three phases of work, culminating in the crafting of a new constitution.