CARICOM wants US aid for rehab of criminal deportees
Stabroek News
September 27, 2000
The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is seeking the assistance of countries such as the US and Canada in creating institutions to promote the reintegration of criminal deportees from those countries into regional societies.
The issue was discussed at a follow-up meeting between CARICOM Foreign Ministers and US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, earlier this month in New York. The two sides had met earlier in the year in Trinidad and Tobago.
But Foreign Minister, Clement Rohee, says that the US wanted to negotiate a collective Memorandum of Understanding with CARICOM on deportees even though it already has a bilateral agreement with Trinidad and Tobago.
According to Foreign Minister Rohee, the twin-island CARICOM state is the only one with which the US government has such an arrangement.
Speaking with reporters on Friday at the Foreign Service Institute, Rohee said that it was now up to the individual states to decide whether they wanted separate or collective agreements with the US.
Explaining Guyana's position on the issue, Rohee said that "the question of deportees poses a national security concern and it is also in a sense a human rights concern." He explained that "many of these persons who are deported either from Canada or the United States have now become products of Canadian or American society."
He said that they would have left this country at a very tender age and were returning to Guyana where they had no relatives.
"I understand that in those jurisdictions they are deemed products of the society in which they have grown up and in which they have become, in a sense, assimilated so that when they come back they are totally alienated."
Asked about the planned draft legislation on deportees which should have been agreed among the CARICOM states, Rohee said that the project "seemed to have lost its way."
In the discussions with Albright, Belize's Foreign Minister, John Briceno, was the lead speaker for CARICOM on the issue at the meeting.
He called for assistance in establishing rehabilitation programmes for criminal deportees and reiterated the importance of providing the national security forces with adequate and up-to-date criminal records of the deportees.
Pressing the case for assistance in the area of rehabilitation, Briceno pointed out that while no CARICOM state wanted criminal elements in its midst, "still we believe in the value of every human person."
"If we can work together to find a mechanism which helps us in CARICOM to build quality rehabilitation programmes with the capacity to educate and train, monitor, and regulate the movements and associations of these criminal deportees, it could be helpful." He pointed out that some of the deportees when returned to the Caribbean had no familial connections and no option but to go back to a community of crime.
"With a properly instituted re-orientation and re-entry programme some of these individuals may be turned into productive citizens.
The possibility of developing our capacity to better reintegrate criminal deportees could be beneficial to both of us."
Rohee said that for the Caribbean it was a decision which each country would have to make for itself.
About the need for up-to-date information on the deportees, Briceno told Albright that what was needed was serious dialogue in search of ways to strengthen our institutions to better confront the complex threats that the issue poses to our societies.
"While we continue to seek assistance in improving our security forces' ability to know these individuals' criminal records," he said that the region "needs assistance to create and maintain databases on the activities of these individuals.
"We also need assistance in finding ways to improve our social services to assist in the re-integration of these individuals into becoming productive members of our society."
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