By Vernon Daley, Staff Reporter
Chuck and Dabdoub
JAMAICA LABOUR Party MPs walked out of a parliamentary committee sitting yesterday, protesting what they charged was the Government's determination to change the Oath of Allegiance to The Queen, without consulting the Jamaican people.
Delroy Chuck and Abe Dabdoub, JLP MPs who were selected to sit on the committee which is studying proposed amendments to the Oath, said they would be drafting a minority report to be submitted to the House for consideration.
Following the departure of the JLP members from the hour-long sitting, the remaining members of the committee, who are all government MPs, agreed to the proposed changes to the Oath, which aim to have public officials swear allegiance to Jamaica and its Constitution, rather than to The Queen. A report of their discussions is scheduled to be sent to the House next week.
"The Opposition is not supporting the present change in the manner in which it is being done. It is not the ends that we are opposed to, it is the means," Mr. Chuck said at the beginning of the committee meeting. He stressed that the JLP was not opposed to changing the Oath but felt that it would be inconsistent to do so while still maintaining The Queen as Head of State.
Chuck, the JLP spokesman on Justice, went further, insisting that it was wrong to make a change to the Constitution without giving the Jamaican people adequate time and opportunity to comment on the proposed changes. Even though amending the Oath requires only a simple majority vote by legislators, Mr. Chuck said the Jamaican people still had a right to be consulted.
"The Constitution is not the Constitution of Parliament. It is the Constitution of the people," he said.
Mr. Dabdoub, who insisted that the government was pushing ahead with the move for the political benefit it could offer, supported his colleague in asking for the people to have an input in changing the Oath.
"I will not sit and parttake in this when the people are denied an input in what is their document," he snapped.
Dr. Peter Phillips, committee chairman and Leader of Government Business, sought to rebuff the JLP's disagreements, stating that the framers of the Constitution had deliberately made a separation between those sections that needed the permission of the people to have them changed and those that could be modified by their political representatives.
"It is with good reason that the drafters made the distinction...," he said.
Government MPs Colin Campbell and Easton Douglas, backed Dr. Phillips and rejected suggestions by the opposition that the government's approach to the amendments bordered on political indecency.
"We are quite in order in doing this on behalf of the people," Mr. Campbell insisted.
Proposals to change the Oath have hopped in and out of public discussions for several years. However, it was firmly put on the agenda after the 1997 general election when Prime Minister P.J. Patterson gave notice that that would have been the last time public officials including parliamentarians and judges would be required to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and to her heirs and successors.
