Bahamas' Court of Appeal hands down landmark citizen ruling (June 25, 2021)

The Bahamas' Court of Appeal this week upheld a historic Supreme Court ruling that children born out of wedlock to foreign women and Bahamian men are entitled to citizenship at birth. It "is light at the end of the tunnel for some residents who have long sought to be recognized as citizens of The Bahamas and to benefit from that recognition, one of five plaintiffs in the matter" told The Tribune. Born to an unwed Bahamian father and a Jamaican mother, he said he hopes that soon people like him will no longer endure the hurt of not being able to travel or find a job because they lack a passport.

But the Bahamas government says it will file an appeal with the London-based Privy Council. The country's attorney general, Carl Bethel, said the ability of all Bahamian men to automatically pass citizenship to their children “remains an open question." (EyeWitness News, Caribbean Media Corporation)

Nonetheless people sought to register to vote at the Parliamentary Registration Department following this week's ruling, raising the question over whether the change is immediate or must await final appeal for implementation, reports the Caribbean Chronicle.

 In 2016, Bahamians in a referendum rejected the idea of amending the Constitution to allow Bahamian fathers of children born out of wedlock to non-Bahamian mothers to automatically pass citizenship to their children.

A bill has been drafted by the Law Reform Commission, that aims to dramatically reform the country’s immigration laws and address long-standing issues surrounding statelessness and the right to pass on citizenship. (Eyewitness News, Tribune 242)

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UN votes against Cuba embargo

The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support of a resolution that calls for the U.S. to lift its embargo against Cuba, as it has since 1992. As is customary, the U.S. and Israel voted against the motion, which was supported by 184 countries. Colombia and Brazil abstained in yesterday's vote -- Brazil had accompanied the Trump administration in voting against the  2019. (United Nations)

The only time the U.S. didn’t cast a no vote was in 2016 during the Obama administration’s opening toward Cuba, when both the U.S. and Israel abstained. (Miami Herald)

The yearly vote is symbolic, and has no practical effect. But it is an indicator of international alliances. This year's vote was seen as a litmus test of U.S. President Joe Biden’s willingness to quickly reverse his predecessor’s tough stance toward Cuba, reports the New York Times. The choice to vote against the resolution appeared to signal that Biden will continue to move cautiously on Cuba. The U.S. ratified the use of sanctions, which it believes are key to advancing democracy and human rights which "remain at the core of our policy efforts toward Cuba," the U.S. Mission's political coordinator, Rodney Hunter, told the assembly. (Associated Press)

But Cuba, and the vast majority of countries in the U.N. focused on the enormous costs the sanctions have levied on Cubans: some speakers yesterday indicated they have cost the Cuban economy around $147.8 billion in losses over nearly six decades, and about $9 billion calculated from April 2019. Many countries flagged the embargo as a Cold War holdover that has been a financial and humanitarian disaster. (Miami Herald)

The resolution has particular relevance in the pandemic context: The embargo is hurting Cuba’s ability to access medical supplies and imposing significant difficulty in obtaining equipment to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, said the country's foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez, citing hurdles the island faced when trying to buy respirators last year. Recent reports indicate that lack of syringes for vaccines is a major challenge. (See Monday's briefs.)

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Cuba's homegrown vaccines

Cuba announced yesterday that two of its nationally developed coronavirus vaccine candidates showed high efficacy rates in late-stage trials. BioCubaFarma, the government-owned pharmaceutical company, that its three-dose Abdala vaccine candidate had an efficacy rate of 92.28% in phase III of clinical trials, while the state-run Finlay Institute of Vaccines said its Soberana 02 had completed phase III trials with an efficacy rate of 62% after two out of three recommended shots. Both vaccines are expected to be granted emergency authority by local regulators shortly. (Miami Herald, Reuters)

Cuba's authorities have already started administering the experimental vaccines en masse as part of "intervention studies" they hope will slow the spread of the virus. About a million of the country's 11.2 million residents have been fully vaccinated to date.

However, some are concerned about a lack of transparency and data about the trials. Cuba hasn’t provided any information about its vaccines to the World Health Organization. Argentina, Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia and Vietnam, among other countries, have expressed interest in buying Cuban vaccines.

The vaccine news was seen as a rare cause for celebration on an island hammered economically by the pandemic's impact on tourism and U.S. economic sanctions, reports the New York Times. Cuba is currently experiencing its worst coronavirus outbreak since the start of the pandemic. It reported 1,561 new cases on Monday, a record.

Climate Justice and Energy

• Climate change is making Atlantic hurricanes far more intense -- the causes are far beyond the control of people on the islands, who suffer the worst consequences, writes Bahamian Bernard Ferguson in the New York Times Magazine that looks at the horrific damage wrought by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. "My Bahamas are facing effects of climate change that we could never have caused ourselves, and crises larger than we can survive alone."

• The six largest private oil companies in the world, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Total, will be key in meeting the International Energy Agency (IEA) goals to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Oil Now makes the case for CCUS technology, which is the process of capturing, storing and sometimes utilizing CO2 that would have otherwise been emitted to the atmosphere.

• But some scientists are arguing that the net-zero strategy simply allows the perpetuation of the status quo and is certain to fail. The hope is that allowing negative emissions to balance continued CO2 emissions as part of net-zero policies will provide a safety net for industries where it is technically impossible to eliminate all emissions — in aviation and agriculture, for instance, explains Fred Pearce in Yale Ecology 360. But some fear the safety net will become a cover for business-as-usual in highly polluting industries.

• Another challenge with the net-zero strategy are indications that climate response to emissions and removals is actually “asymmetrical” – that is, the carbon cycle and climate response to CO2 emissions is not equal and opposite to CO2 removals of the same magnitude, writes Professor Kirsten Zickfeld at Carbon Brief.

• An overseas Guyanese group, "The Oil and Gas Governance Network," launched a campaign calling on Guyana's government to renegotiate its contract with Exxon. (Kaieteur News)

Covid-19 Impact

• Covid-19 is expected to wipe out more than a decade of development and progress in the Caribbean and Latin America. But countries in the region have received limited multilateral debt support, as middle-income countries are not eligible for the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) or its Common Framework for Debt Treatment. The European Commission and ECLAC are calling for a paradigm shift in development cooperation, that recognizes that classifications based solely on income-per-capita criteria do not reflect the whole range of a country’s multidimensional vulnerabilities, structural gaps and financing needs, write Alicia Bárcena and Jutta Urpilainen.

• Haiti is the only Caricom country expected to benefit from the direct U.S. donation of 14 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine to Latin America and the Caribbean. So far, it hasn't received a single jab, reports the Caribbean News Network.

• The U.S. announced it will also donate approximately 14 million vaccines for Latin America and the Caribbean through Covax, some of which will go to other Caribbean Community countries. (White House)

• Getting the vaccines is one thing; getting people to take them is another, noted Janine Mendes-Franco in a recent Global Voices piece. Many smaller regional territories in the Caribbean are experiencing vaccine hesitancy and their governments have been donating part of their allocations to larger Caribbean Community (CARICOM) neighbors who need them.

• Masked, a documentary, features St. Lucian women on the frontline of the pandemic: small entrepreneurs in early childhood education; hospitality and agriculture - sharing their personal stories of the immediate and longer-term impact of Covid-19 which has resulted, in some cases, in them losing their jobs.

• The pandemic has made it drastically harder for Venezuelan migrants to Trinidad and Tobago to survive economically: 68 per cent of employed migrants lost their jobs due to Covid-19. (International Organization for Migration) 

Democracy

• Puerto Rico Governor Pedro Pierluisi said the U.S. territory's lack of statehood is a form of discrimination and called on Congress to lay out steps for the island to become a state. (CBS)

• The pro-statehood movement now feels especially urgent for supporters who see an opportunity in the majority Democratic U.S. Congress, reports CBS separately. 

• Haiti's government sought to assure the United Nations Security council that the country's "electoral process is following its normal course.” Acting Haiti Prime Minister Claude Joseph asked skeptical members of the international community to ante up $17 million for an elections fund, reports the Miami Herald.

• Amid worsening socioeconomic conditions, rising criminal gang violence and a resurgence of COVID-19, Haiti’s leaders must commit to good-faith dialogue aimed at ending a longstanding and damaging political impasse, the UN’s senior official in the country told the UN Security Council last week.

• A controversial constitutional referendum pushed by Haitian President Jovenel Moïse scheduled for this weekend was postponed due to Covid-19. But the delay only adds to the building political chaos in Haiti stemming from Moïse’s efforts to expand his power in the country, reports AS/COA in an explainer on the country's prolonged political crisis.

Human Rights

• An estimated 95 armed gangs control about a third of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. These gangs are increasingly engaged in armed battles for territory control, affecting the lives of around 1.5 million people, warns UNICEF. The current situation of gangs’ violence and IDPs in the capital city’s metropolitan area is feared to go towards a further deterioration with elections later this year.

• The U.S. announced it would ease some of its sanctions against the Royal Saint Lucia Police Force, and resume full cooperation with and assistance to a number of local police units. The US withdrew training and material assistance to the police in 2013, due to ‘credible allegations’ of gross human rights violations. (St. Lucia Times)

Culture

• U.S. actor Michael B. Jordan backtracked on plans to name his rum brand "J'Ouvert," after backlash over what many considered cultural appropriation of a term that signals the start of carnival in the Caribbean and is a cornerstone of tradition in Trinidad and Tobago. (Guardian)

• Jamaican Roland Watson-Grant won this year's Commonwealth Short Story Prize for the Caribbean region. His writing tells us about the strained and tenuous links between rural life in 21st century Jamaica and the rapid changes taking place outside the narrow confines of communities, writes Emma Lewis in Global Voices.

• 12 Best Audiobooks by Women for Caribbean Heritage Month -- Repeating Islands

Events

28 June

• Vaccines for the Caribbean: Why it matters for the United States -- Atlantic Council

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