Raul Garcia case a violation of human rights
“Can it really be true that a people whose fore-parents suffered the worst possible human rights abuses at the hands of English slave-masters now have less regard for human rights than the English? Oh, say it isn’t so Barbados!”
by David Comissiong
The Raul Garcia case provides Barbados with a “teachable moment” par excellence… yet not one of the supposedly responsible leadership institutions of our society has risen to the challenge of saying anything enlightening or educational to the Barbadian people about this issue.
We have not heard a single informed or constructive word from Parliament, the church, UWI, the Bar Association, the trade union movement, the Democratic Labour Party or the Barbados Labour Party!
These establishment institutions have displayed their civic indifference by studiously failing to intervene in a public discourse in which a sizable component of the Barbadian public has been shamefully asserting that it is permissible for our nation to indefinitely imprison a non-Barbadian “stranger in our midst”, or to simply “put him on a small boat and send him out to sea”.
Clearly there is a segment of our populace whose thinking and ethics are still firmly lodged in the pre-historic “dark ages”, and who seem to have little conception of human rights or of international humanitarian law! But how can ordinary citizens know any better when the supposedly enlightened leadership institutions of their society fail to either lead or to enlighten? Continue reading
