I am painful­ly aware of a de­clin­ing ap­petite for mat­ters re­lat­ed to hu­man rights and their place in both do­mes­tic and in­ter­na­tion­al law.

There is every­thing be­tween the Blue Wave and Blue Wa­ters to keep us oth­er­wise oc­cu­pied, and that is un­der­stand­able. But we must, at some point, recog­nise some of the silent but sig­nif­i­cant con­nec­tions in­volv­ing civ­il and po­lit­i­cal rights.

Next week, Caribbean jour­nal­ists will con­sid­er re­lat­ed mat­ters when the Me­dia In­sti­tute of the Caribbean (MIC), sup­port­ed by the French Em­bassy in Port-of- Spain, ex­am­ines cur­rent re­gion­al geopo­lit­i­cal chal­lenges.

There are crit­i­cal is­sues be­ing ig­nored amid the whirl­wind of in­trigue and con­flict that seems to be at­tract­ing the most at­ten­tion.

Last week, the In­ter­Amer­i­can Com­mis­sion on Hu­man Rights (IACHR) and the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ) host­ed a closed ses­sion on Equal­i­ty be­fore the Law, Ar­bi­trary & Pre-Tri­al De­ten­tion, to which, as a layper­son, I was sur­pris­ing­ly in­vit­ed as a pre­sen­ter.

My brief was to ex­am­ine the judg­ment of the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice (CCJ) in Derek Ram­samooj v The State of Suri­name with­in the con­text of the dor­mant Cari­com Char­ter of Civ­il So­ci­ety.

I had the op­por­tu­ni­ty, be­fore mem­bers of the ju­di­cia­ry, re­gion­al bar as­so­ci­a­tions and oth­er se­nior folks, to pro­pose that the judg­ment could be a turn­ing point in the re­gion’s un­der­stand­ing of rights, re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion and the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of gov­ern­ments to their cit­i­zens.

The judg­ment notes the gap be­tween re­gion­al com­mit­ments made by gov­ern­ments and their prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion. Yes, there might be those in pow­er who would prob­a­bly pre­fer with­draw­al from mul­ti­lat­er­al oblig­a­tions of that kind. So, some of this will ap­pear en­tire­ly ir­rel­e­vant to cho­sen paths.

The de­tails of the case were dis­cussed here on June 24 and were elab­o­rat­ed up­on by the pre­sen­ta­tions of CCJ Pres­i­dent Win­ston An­der­son and Jus­tice Chan­tal Onon­ai­wu last week.

The court was re­quired to con­sid­er whether rights guar­an­teed un­der the Re­vised Treaty of Ch­aguara­mas (RTC), in­clud­ing free­dom of move­ment and the pro­vi­sion of ser­vices, could be mean­ing­ful­ly ex­er­cised with­out min­i­mum pro­tec­tions for fun­da­men­tal hu­man rights.

The court’s an­swer was that the ef­fec­tive ex­er­cise of treaty-based rights must be ac­com­pa­nied by such guar­an­tees.

In do­ing so, the judg­ment al­so pro­vid­ed prac­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance to the char­ter, signed in 1997.

Al­though the char­ter is not a bind­ing treaty, the rul­ing recog­nised its rel­e­vance in in­ter­pret­ing com­mu­ni­ty law and iden­ti­fy­ing the gen­er­al prin­ci­ples un­der­pin­ning re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion.

The im­por­tance of this de­vel­op­ment was un­der­scored by Jus­tice An­der­son, who de­scribed the case as one of the court’s “sem­i­nal cas­es in the Orig­i­nal Ju­ris­dic­tion.”

He al­so em­pha­sised the im­por­tance of de­ter­min­ing whether a min­i­mum hu­man rights stan­dard ap­plies when re­gion­al na­tion­als ex­er­cise rights un­der the re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion frame­work.

In se­ri­ous coun­tries, the re­spec­tive bar as­so­ci­a­tions would have been busy pars­ing the text of the judg­ment and de­bat­ing its val­ue as the out­come of a “sem­i­nal” case.

I ar­gued that the judg­ment of­fers an op­por­tu­ni­ty to es­tab­lish the char­ter to its right­ful place in Caribbean po­lit­i­cal, le­gal and in­sti­tu­tion­al dis­course.

There are 27 ar­ti­cles that ad­dress equal­i­ty be­fore the law, per­son­al se­cu­ri­ty, fair hear­ings, free­dom of ex­pres­sion, de­mo­c­ra­t­ic par­tic­i­pa­tion, peace­ful as­sem­bly, good gov­er­nance and a range of so­cial, eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al rights.

Al­most three decades af­ter its adop­tion, pub­lic aware­ness of this in­stru­ment re­mains lim­it­ed. Its prin­ci­ples are rarely in­voked in sus­tained ex­am­i­na­tions of leg­is­la­tion, ad­min­is­tra­tive con­duct and the per­for­mance of pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions.

There are al­so pre­scribed mon­i­tor­ing and re­port­ing arrange­ments. But there is a need to re­in­force these through a struc­tured mech­a­nism which com­ple­ments, rather than re­lies ex­clu­sive­ly on, the UN Uni­ver­sal Pe­ri­od­ic Re­view and the In­ter-Amer­i­can sys­tem.

Such aware­ness needs to be more mean­ing­ful­ly main­streamed. And the char­ter should fea­ture much more promi­nent­ly in le­gal ed­u­ca­tion, jour­nal­ism train­ing, pub­lic pol­i­cy dis­cus­sions, and civic ed­u­ca­tion through­out the re­gion­al com­mu­ni­ty.

We should not wait for the Blue Wave and the Blue Wa­ters to sub­side. In 1992, the Ram­phal Com­mis­sion de­scribed the mo­ment as a Time for Ac­tion. We are back there. Will there be ac­tion this time around?