– ‘We can’t expose ourselves to these potential capricious measurement systems’
Guyanese Head of State Bharrat Jagdeo said Guyana is of the view that labour and environmental standards should be avoided as criteria for trade mechanisms. Developed countries have used these as protectionist measures in the past.
“What I am more concerned about is who judges your labour and environmental standards and often there is no transparency in that process,” the President noted.
He said Guyana will be submitting its position to its regional colleagues who negotiate on the Region’s behalf.
The president said if Trafficking in Persons (TIP) is a problem in the Caribbean and it is real, then the community should be ashamed and should be dealing with it.
“We should not allow any person, women or children, to be held in bondage; but when someone puts in a document that they removed 984 children from extreme forms of child labour in Guyana, as in the case of the US State Department, and everyone in the country is oblivious to where the children were removed from and where they were placed, then how could someone take such a report seriously?” he questioned
“If they wanted us to go after these people, because that is breaking the laws of Guyana, we have ratified most of the International Labour Organisation’s conventions, more than developed countries, more than Canada and the US, so they should share this information with us so we can prosecute people.”
He said despite numerous requests, Guyana cannot get the information. “There is no transparency in measurement, so I am fearful of the same thing as it relates to labour,” President Jagdeo cautioned.
He said some labour unions might be close to the government of the day in a country and in a clandestine manner, the country under review could face sanctions because of an adverse report.
“We can’t expose ourselves to these potential capricious measurement systems,” he said. He said his views are reflective of Guyana’s position, but Guyana has to work with the region and he thinks that states must clarify their positions before they go forward.
In 2009, President Jagdeo, alluding to the US TIP report on Guyana which placed Guyana on Tier 2, signalled his intention to write to United States President Barack Obama and ask him to review the process of constructing the reports since they are misleading and lecture the world rather than help.
The Head of State has said that on numerous occasions in Europe there were talks about human rights conditionalities being attached to trade and aid. Referring then to the report, President Jagdeo said that it takes 100 documented cases to place a country on the Human Trafficking Tier in the US State Department report, but in Guyana’s case, only two documented cases were produced in 2009.
INTERPOL (the International Police), the world’s second largest intergovernmental organization, an organization chartered by 188 nations to investigate organised crime, has indicated that Guyana has not been designated as a country involved in trafficking in persons, neither is any Guyanese being sought for any offence related to trafficking in persons by Interpol. In a telephone interview with the Guyana Chronicle, an information liaison with the body said that trafficking in persons is an international criminal activity vigorously pursued by Interpol and the organization has no reason to believe nor do they possess any direct evidence of Guyana or Guyanese being involved in human trafficking.
Guyana’s Minister of Human Services and Social Security, Priya Manickchand, in speaking with Luis C De Baca, Ambassador-at-large and head of the Global Trafficking In Persons (GTIP) office at the US State Department in a telephone conversation last month, insisted that the conclusions and recommendations in the report are based on an earlier inaccuracy about large numbers of traffickers and trafficking victims existing in Guyana.
The Minister had noted that despite sincere and comprehensive efforts, the State Department failed to have the inaccuracies corrected and GTIP continued basing their conclusions and recommendations on those inaccuracies.
The Government of Guyana insists that the reports are misleading and based on fabrications.(GINA)