St Vincent and Grenadines government pauses constitutional amendment bills after public backlash

The St Vincent and the Grenadines government has delayed a controversial effort to amend a section of the country’s constitution that the opposition says renders the prime minister ineligible for his position in parliament.

Two bills, among six listed for the parliament session on Tuesday this week, were aimed at clarifying a section of the 1979 constitution governing the citizenship eligibility of members of parliament.

The bills were drafted after the country’s opposition filed election petitions, due to be heard at the eastern Caribbean supreme court in July, questioning the eligibility of Godwin Friday, who became prime minister in November, and Dwight Fitzgerald Bramble, an MP – both of whom hold Canadian as well as Vincentian citizenship.

But amid online outrage and demonstrations near parliament – with protesters brandishing placards that read “constitutional change without the voice of the people” and “Friday and Bramble protecting their Canadian passports” – Friday told MPs he would delay the bills to allow more public debate on the issue.

“We will not be proceeding any further now at this point until we have had these full responses from the public debate on these two very important matters,” he told parliament on Tuesday.

Discussions about the case have become particularly focused on a section of the constitution that details possible disqualifications that would stop someone from being elected or appointed as an MP, including anyone who “by virtue of his own act” is “under any acknowledgment of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state”.

Petitioners pointed to the case of the former St Kitts and Nevis prime minister Denzil Douglas, who in 2020 was ordered by the eastern Caribbean supreme court to vacate his seat after being found in breach of the country’s constitution when he acquired a Dominican diplomatic passport.

The former Trinidad and Tobago prime minister Stuart Young, who is the attorney representing the petitioners, said he was “confident in the merit of the election petitions”, which he said were backed by a sound interpretation of the constitution.

The government’s draft bills would retroactively limit the definition of “foreign power or state” to non-Commonwealth countries, meaning that acquired citizenship from any of the 56 in the Commonwealth would not disqualify someone from holding public office in St Vincent and the Grenadines.