Minister of Social Services and Community Development, Melanie Griffin, said The Bahamas has not shunned the international laws set to protect the country’s youth.
In fact, she added, The Bahamas had done all it could to ensure that the guidelines from The United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child Treaty are upheld.
[Bahamas B2B Editor’s Note: The Minister is lying and she knows it. The truth is; The Bahamas does violate UN treaties and conventions. Amnesty International found major breaches of the Bahamas’ obligations under the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and other international human rights treaties.
The Bahamas is also a serial violator of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), signed back in 1993, pledging to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women. To this day, despite direct promises by Perry Christie to correct the blatant discrimination, the rights of women in The Bahamas are still being violated by a flawed constitution which denies basic rights to women that are given to men.]
Speaking at a town meeting where Bahamians were given a final chance to voice their opinions on the government’s proposed Child Protection Act, Minister Griffin responded to the claims by President of Bahamian Fathers for Children Everywhere, Clever Duncombe, who insisted that the government of The Bahamas had blatantly turned its back on the guidelines of the treaty, which the country signed back in 1990.
He told The Nassau Guardian that the proposed piece of legislation was not in keeping with the UN’s treaty, prompting his organisation to file a lawsuit against the government.
But Minister Griffin told the audience Tuesday night that the claims are unfounded.
“The Bahamas has complied in many ways with the Convention on the Rights of the Child Treaty,” she said. “So I beg to differ that there is a blatant defiance by the government to follow the rules.”
The social services minister did admit, however, that there are certain areas that need to be addressed, as potholes can still be seen in the proposed legislation. But at Tuesday night’s town meeting, she presented the newly amended proposed Child Protection Act 2006.
The most controversial article in the proposed legislation, which had its first reading in Parliament last week, was article 6 (1) that addressed parental responsibility.
The initial clause stated that, “every parent shall have parental responsibility for his child, but, in the case of a child born out of wedlock, the father does not have parental responsibility…”
Initially, Mr Duncombe said this clause blatantly discriminates against Bahamian men who father children out of wedlock and “leaves the door wide open for children to be discriminated against.”
But the amended article changes the wording of the section and now reads: “Every parent shall have parental responsibility for his child but in the case of a child born out of wedlock a court may, if it deems it just, disregard any right …of the father…” Minister Griffin added that changes have also been made to other sections of the proposed legislation regarding care for children, crimes against and by children and the penalties for cruelty against children. While social services officials presented their changes to the Act, members of the audience had even more suggestions to strengthen the document. Some Bahamians have called for an AMBER alert to be implemented for missing children, a registry for child sex offenders and even longer prison sentences for convicted child sex offenders.
By: IANTHIA SMITH, The Nassau Guardian
