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BELMOPAN, Belize -- In a historic ruling here Wednesday (April 16), the Supreme Court nullified offshore oil exploration licenses issued by the government in 2004 and 2007, and extended in 2009.
The concessions were awarded secretly by this CARICOM nation of 356,000 people - sandwiched between Guatemala and Mexico. They included rights to drill for oil on land and in offshore waters, including sensitive protected areas of Belize's famed barrier reef - a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
After a whistleblower brought the concessions to public attention in 2010, scores of civil society groups banded together to form the Belize Coalition to Save our Natural Heritage. The Coalition launched a vigorous campaign against offshore drilling, which was supported by the international marine conservation society, Oceana.
Last October the government tabled an historic Freedom of Information Bill in Parliament - fulfilling a key election pledge. This law is expected to be debated this month.
Some have called the proposed legislation weak, arguing that it defers too much power to Cabinet and includes too many exemptions. Others say it is a big step towards more openness, but success will depend on how robust the implementation process is.
The Bill is an almost verbatim copy of the Freedom of Information Act passed by the Cayman Islands legislature in 2007. That law was formulated over a period of years by a Cabinet Office working group which looked at similar legislation enacted by Britain, Canada and other West Indian islands.
The Cayman government created a 16-member steering committee after the law was passed to guide the project to completion. And a separate implementation committee was also appointed, headed by a Jamaican civil rights lawyer, which was responsible for training, awareness and procedures.
The Caymanian law took effect in January 2009, and by all accounts it has had a big impact on the way government authorities interact with the press and with the community in general.
In a recent Tribune article, heart specialist Dr Conville Brown complained about Bahamians spending millions of dollars in the US for medical care that could easily be obtained at home.
He was arguing in favour of local healthcare providers building a large-scale medical tourism industry here. "The same things that all tourists do," he said, "the medical tourist has to do. (And) if the ownership is Bahamian, then the economy really wins because those funds will stay here."
But at the same time he felt constrained to point out that Bahamians were offsetting the income from foreigners by flying off to get treatment in the US. "We boost their economy big time. We are reverse medical tourists. Several hospitals in South Florida say their biggest international clientele is from the Bahamas."
Medical tourism is a multi-billion-dollar growth industry that hospitals, doctors and tourism marketers around the world are eager to tap into. By some accounts, more than half a million Americans travel to other countries for medical treatment - partly for cost reasons and partly to take advantage of procedures not yet approved in the US.
There can be no disagreement with Dr Brown’s position in terms of the Bahamian economy. And for patients, the benefits are equally obvious and compelling. If Bahamians obtained their medical treatment at home they would significantly reduce the logistics, expense and stress of being treated abroad.
Why then, do so many of us spend so much money overseas for treatments that are available right here at home? We can answer that question fairly confidently - given a choice, patients will seek medical care from the doctors, hospitals and clinics they trust the most.
GEORGE TOWN, the Cayman Islands -- The political status of this tiny British Overseas Territory south of Cuba, which enjoys one of the world's highest standards of living, is often described by local intellectuals as "voluntary colonialism".
As late as the 1950s, the Caymanos - to use an earlier name - were known as "the islands that time forgot". But today they are home to a dazzling array of high-end tourist and financial infrastructure, populated by a cosmopolitan and largely affluent workforce of 36,000 - more than half of which is from other countries.
Grand Cayman has managed to preserve its position as a top financial centre in the face of a crackdown on international money laundering and tax evasion, as well as the recessionary impact of the global credit crisis. And tourism grew by more than 5 per cent last year, for a total of 1.9 million visitors. In fact, the island is buzzing with activity.
The Cayman islands are no longer a backwater. Despite being subject to British colonial rule (and occasionally whining about it), Caymanians are way ahead of Bahamians in terms of holding their government to account. In addition to a national ombudsman and an independent auditor-general, the legislature unanimously approved a freedom of information law in 2007.
In Parliament last week, National Security Minister Tommy Turnquest responded to my complaint about the lack of comprehensive information on crime and justice by saying there was "too much" of it in the public domain!
He then went on to table the latest crime statistics (which obviously weren't public beforehand), and quoted from a report which he described as "confidential" because it contained the names of judges who had granted bail to repeat offenders and others accused of serious crimes.
Well, why should that little detail make such a report confidential? The data in that report contains most of the information I was referring to earlier. If a public official (a judge) makes a public decision (a ruling) in a public court of law, how come the public can't know about it?
If I attended the courts 24/7 (as the chief justice so helpfully suggested recently) I would already know this information. Give me a flipping break!
And even if we were to concede that this particular piece of public information should be kept secret, why isn't the rest of the information contained in the report put in the public domain and published on a regular basis?
Only a few months ago the Guardian was complaining that it couldn't get access to the latest crime figures from the police. Turnquest eventually broke that bottleneck, but that doesn't deny it existed.
Why are we so petulant about the issue of public information being available in the public domain? We all know how things go here. As I said before, the political class think that information is their right to withhold as one of the perquisites of power.
I'll say it again - in order to properly weigh the issue of bail we need comprehensive facts and figures. How many suspects are bailed annually, for what offences and after what length of remand? How many of these people commit crimes while on bail? What happens to them after that? What are the reasons for them being bailed? I could go on, and on.
The big story this week was from the House of Assembly, where the government tabled a raft of hugely anticipated legislation designed to ratchet up the fight against crime.
The measures included changes to the Bail Act, the Firearms Act and the Dangerous Drugs Act, as well as new laws to protect witnesses and curb the sale of stolen property. Two new courts will apply stiffer penalties for drug and gun crimes, and border controls will be strengthened for firearms.
In the run-up to the introduction of these proposals, National Security Minister Tommy Turnquest criticised judges for being "too liberal" in giving bail to suspected offenders. Lawyer Dion Hanna called the minister's remarks "intemperate," but I disagree. I would say his remarks speak to an important question of justice and public policy. Whether they were right or wrong is another matter.
In a wide-ranging interview on ZNS last week, former Bar Association president and top trial lawyer Wayne Munroe pointed out some of the critical failures of our criminal justice system while offering up some practical solutions.
But the unfortunate thing about what he had to say is that it has all been said before over the years in one form or another - and largely ignored by the political class, according to Munroe.
"It's a systems issue that we diagnosed well before 2002 and the system has only gotten worse since then," he told Jerome Sawyer, host of ZNS' nightly interview show, The Sawyer Report.
Defying conventional wisdom, he claimed "the fixes are not in the judicial system but in the executive system, on the prosecutorial side. It is not the courts that are to blame. We spend time making recommendations and governments come and go but nothing ever changes."
The Privy Council's recent ruling to overturn the death sentence of convicted murderer Max Tido has reignited the smouldering debate over capital punishment in the Bahamas.
In dismissing an appeal against conviction, the Privy Council said there was "overwhelming" evidence against Tido, so "a finding of guilt was inevitable" - despite noting that the defendant should have been identified first in a line-up, and not while alone in the dock, and that there should have been a psychological determination that he was sane at the time of the murder.
But the judgment also concluded that this was not a murder that warranted the most extreme punishment of death. This conclusion was based on what the Privy Council viewed as "established law" - that the death penalty should be reserved only for the most extreme and exceptional cases, and only where there is no prospect of reform of the offender.
Cases where the death penalty is justified, it said, are "those in which the murder is carefully planned and carried out in furtherance of another crime", such as armed robbery, rape, human smuggling, drug wars, kidnapping, witness intimidation, "and the killing of innocents for the gratification of base desires." As a result, Tido's case is being sent back to the Court of Appeal in Nassau for "the imposition of an appropriate sentence."
Max Tido was found guilty in 2006 of the murder of 16-year-old Donnella Conover after testimony that the teenager was lured from her home in the early morning hours of May 2, 2002, and brutally beaten to death off Cowpen Road. He later received a discretionary death sentence, but after appeals for clemency were denied in 2007 and 2009, lawyers took the case to the Privy Council.
Let the punishment be equal with the offence. -- Cicero
"In the end, it is the poor who are selected to die." -- Sister Helen Prejean
At a College of the Bahamas seminar recently, I sat next to a first-year law student who had a degree in criminal justice from an American college. When asked what should be done to address crime, the first word out of her mouth was "hanging".
And it appears that most preachers are also firmly in favour of the death penalty, although it flies in the face of everything written in the New Testament. Indeed, some would have no objection to turning the clock back centuries and making executions into a public spectacle.
The serious public interest issues raised by the unexpected death of 42-year-old Christopher Esfakis - the son of one of Nassau's legendary GPs - at Doctors Hospital seven years ago remain unresolved, despite multiple attempts to have them addressed.
These matters relate to the delivery of healthcare to all Bahamians and are separate and apart from the personal liability issue surrounding the death itself. That is tied up in a civil suit filed by Esfakis' widow, Lisa, against the hospital and six doctors in 2003. It is still before the court.
But before we look at what the public interest is, here's a brief summary of events to date in this multifaceted case:
A few months after Esfakis died in April 2002, his family began questioning the medical treatment he had received (on the advice of concerned doctors). Following a review of the case by local and foreign experts, the family launched several initiatives to have the matter investigated.
