It is altogether fitting that, on this day which has, allegedly, inspired the creation of so many happy unions, the Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community should meet to advance the cause of Caribbean unity.
In the expectation that this meeting will be characterised by all the happier sentiments which the day evokes, I am greatly pleased on behalf of the Government and people of Barbados to offer you a warm welcome to our shores, and I require and command you to revel in the total hospitality that Barbados is anxious to afford.
I assume the mantle of chairmanship of our Community in a Region beset.
We are a creative people; a people who have survived the trauma of genocide, wars and invasions; have risen above slavery and indentured servitude; a people who transcending language and ethnicity have forged our own creolised culture, our own identity, our own special Caribbean civilisation.
Our entire history has been the triumph of the resilience of our people in the face of overwhelming odds. At the start of a new millennium, it is however palpable that the odds are now being stacked against us more fiercely than ever in our crisis-ridden history.
In the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the spread of a virulently criminal culture associated with the illicit trade in drugs we face powerful new threats to the fragile stability of the world’s smallest and most vulnerable Region.
Our traditional economic activities face destabilising threats from the application of new rules of international trade. Our newer economic enterprise – on which so much depend – function under a grim cloud of uncertainty, generated by the actions of the powerful of the world who apparently feel that it is right that we should create a new global society, characterised by a dangerous inequality, that would enable some to be dissatisfied with more than all, while the rest of us must be satisfied with less than enough.
In the political sphere, we have been forced recently to witness and endure strange, new challenges to the democratic, good governance, based upon respect for the constitution and the rule of law, that has exemplified the Caribbean tradition among the family of nations.
Ahead of us lies the task of sensitively and successfully integrating Haiti, the first free black nation, into the Caribbean family, embracing the entire Haitian society in that relationship, and resting that relationship on the Charter of Civil Society that we have established as the basis for our Community relations.
In our international dealings, we face challenges expected of no other group of nations – to successfully forge a new relationship with our neighbours in this Hemisphere, under the Summit of the Americas process, at the same time to evolve a new relationship with Europe under the Cotonou Agreement, while seeking to build new relationships with the entire global society under the auspices of the multilateral trade negotiations that are even now proceeding in the context of the work of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
In our domestic affairs, the Region of the world that can least afford not to integrate economically seek to evolve a new Caribbean Single Market and Economy which, even as it is being conceived, is being buffeted by the adverse winds of entrenched insularity, and serenaded by the lamentations of the Caribbean Jeremiahs.
The dawn of a new century in this Region therefore marks a watershed not just in a chronological sense, but in the cascading of processes and the confluence of events that make this a defining epoch in Caribbean development.
These are the times that test men’s souls.
The challenges and threats are so powerful that it would be easy and convenient for us to take refuge in defeatism – to doubt ourselves, and to stifle the creative response that this juncture in Caribbean development demands for us by not acting because of a fear of failure.
I say to you that the Caribbean must not stop now because of the fear of failure.
We must go on.
We will find a way through.
For me, it is therefore a matter of the highest significance that at a moment when we could all be overtaken by a fear of failure, Heads of Government have decided to use this meeting to make an important statement of confidence in the future of our Region by signing an Agreement to create a Caribbean Court of Justice.
We have had a long test, a long search for our own Caribbean Court of Justice.
When our fore bearers in this Region petitioned Her Majesty in Council in 1833, they would little have divined that one and three quarter centuries later we would still have our cases referred to Downing Street.
In 1947, somewhat before I was born, Colonial Governors of the West Indies met at this site under the Chairmanship of a Lord Listowell of the Colonial Office. They heard complaints from Jamaica about Trinidad’s domination of intra-regional trade. That was a reality then, it is a perception now.
They expressed strong support for the creation of a University of the West Indies.
They pressed the case for the free movement of Caribbean people throughout their region.
And they reflected on the need for a West Indies Court of Justice and urged its establishment.
Are we the leaders of the Caribbean, in the year 2001, to be less enlightened and visionary about the ability of the Caribbean people independently to service the ends of Justice in our Region that Colonial Governors were in 1947?
I say no.
Now, we are all agreed, after 50 years of effort, on the way forward.
Let us act. Heads of Government have routinely been pilloried for inertia. There can be no harm now in being criticised for implementing a measure 50 years after it was first proposed.
It will require no act of courage for me this evening, to sign the Agreement to create a Caribbean Court of Justice.
The Constitution of Barbados anticipated this moment and requires it of me.
It will however require a certain political courage on the part of some of my colleagues, who have faced stern and somewhat implacable opposition in their domestic jurisdictions about signing.
I respect and applaud their courage because they will sign the Agreement not because it is politically popular, but because, deep in their hearts, they know that it is the right thing to do.
I especially salute the political courage of my colleague, Prime Minister P.J. Patterson of Jamaica, who has laboured in the vineyard of Caribbean regionalism longer than any of us, who was there when the Treaty of Chaguaramas was signed and is here today to sign an integration instrument of no less historic significance.
To P.J., as you sign, the distant sounds that you will hear are those of the Caribbean people cheering you on.
To the people of the Caribbean and the Bar Associations who have expressed reservations, I say we respect your dissent, we will accommodate your concerns, but let us not now at this juncture of Caribbean development overwhelm ourselves with a sense of doubt and a fear of failure.
Let us go forward together.
As I sign this Agreement this evening, I pledge on behalf of the people of Barbados, solemnly, that I will spare no resource to ensure that the Caribbean Court of Justice is a celebration and icon of Caribbean achievement, and serves to lift the bar of accomplishment as an inspiration of what we can together achieve.
As Prime Minister with responsibility for the Single Market and Economy, you will empathise with me if, now that we have created the legal framework for such an entity, I use the office you give me, as Chairman to help create, in the next six months, a new set of institutional arrangements to make the Single Market and Economy a vibrant lived experience in the lives of the ordinary man and woman all across the Caribbean. This matter will especially engage the attention of the Community in the six months ahead.
I must, this evening, however alert you to a broader purpose.
The Secretary-General and the other officials of the Caribbean have prepared a document on the future of the Caribbean Community.
At this juncture in Caribbean development, in a Region beset with unusual challenges, our future is not what it used to be.
We need to embrace a bold new vision of a new vibrant Caribbean.
That vision can only be meaningful if it originates as a shared perspective of the entire Caribbean people.
We hence need an encounter this year between the leadership of the Community and the people of our Community to develop that shared perspective, the agreed consensus, and to settle on the way forward.
I propose therefore to use the occasion and the opportunity of the Chairmanship of CARICOM to help place an Encounter with the Region’s civil society to build that sense of regional ownership and partnership on the way forward.
It will be an enterprise whose ethos is not foreign to me.
For the social partnership of Barbados, which has done at our domestic level what we seek at the regional level has more than proven itself as the most important foundation of Barbadian development.
Ours is a Region beset with major challenges. But as we showed at the 2000 Olympics, we are capable of achievements on a global basis entirely out of all proportion to our size.
Let us therefore agree to go forward, together.
