Jamaican National Elected To IACHR

WASHINGTON, DC, CMC – Jamaican attorney Margarette May Maculay has been elected as a Commissioner of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for a four-year term.

Macaulay serves as Mediator in the Supreme Court of Jamaica and an Associate Arbitrator, as well as serving as a Notary Public.

The graduate of the University of London who was elected during the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS),last week, also served as a judge of the IACHR from 2007 to 2012, contributing to the formulation of the Court’s Rules of Procedure.

The IACHR said that the Commissioners, whose mandates will end on December 31 this year, include Trinidadian law professor Rose-Marie Antoine and Jamaican Tracy Robinson.

According to the American Convention on Human Rights, the Commission is composed of seven members, “who must be persons of high moral character, and recognized competence in the field of human rights, elected in a personal capacity by the OAS General Assembly from a list of candidates proposed by the governments of the member states”.

The members of the Commission are elected for a four-year term and may be re-elected only once to serve on the IACHR, a principal, autonomous body of the OAS that derives its mandate from the OAS Charter and the American Convention on Human Rights.

Meanwhile, IACHR is calling on Trinidad and Tobago as well as Barbados to initiate legislative reform, to abolish the mandatory death penalty and to address weaknesses in its equal opportunity legislation.

In a report released here last weekend, the IACHR, said Barbados as well as Trinidad and Tobago were two Caribbean countries “whose laws still contemplate the mandatory death penalty.”

It said that among other troubling aspects is that “participating organisations reported that while the death penalty has not been carried out in this region since 2008, a number of states are still opposed to abolishing it.”

The report notes that Suriname abolished the death penalty on March 3, and Barbados “has made a commitment to abolish capital punishment.

“It is worth noting that ten countries in the region have abolished the mandatory death penalty in compliance with decisions of the inter-American human rights system,” the report noted.

“The IACHR reiterates the need to move forward with legislative reforms in the countries of the Greater Caribbean, so as to abolish capital punishment throughout this region or, failing that, to impose a moratorium on its application,” it adds.