NIDS committee to start meeting January 5

THE 15-member special select committee of Parliament to review the new draft of the National Identification and Registration Act (NIDS Bill) will officially start sitting on January 5 at Gordon House in downtown Kingston.

Chairman of the committee, Delroy Chuck, made the announcement at an emergency meeting of the members, which followed Friday’s sitting of the Senate.

He called the committee together minutes after the members of the Senate were named, and their weekly meeting was completed. He said that it was necessary to allow the committee to be introduced to the teams from the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) and his own Ministry of Justice, and open up the lines of communication between them.

Chuck said, too, that it would allow the committee members to get any clarification needed of the provisions of the Bill, as well as allow the committee and its staff to get advertisements and public education rolling immediately.

“Before we meet formally on January 5, if you have any concerns or need for clarification, you can ask any of the officers from the OPM to respond, and if they can’t, I am sure they will discuss it with other members of the OPM staff,” he said.

“The Bill itself is not technical, but I am sure that you will have questions and I am asking you to be in touch with them as early as possible, so that any clarifications that are needed, or any concerns you may have, can be examined during the break [up to January 5],” he added.

He urged the OPM to focus on sensitising the public on the existence and importance of the Bill, so that they are aware of the provisions by the time the committee starts sitting.

It was also agreed that a chairman and four members will make up a quorum for meetings, and that copies of the Bill will be available on both the OPM and Ministry of Justice websites.

“We want the widest cross-section of Jamaicans to be involved, because this Bill is going to affect every Jamaican, whether they want to register or not… At the end of the day, we don’t want when we have passed the Bill people say that they never knew about the Bill,” he added.

Parliament is to promote the presence of the Bill on its website and in the local press. However, as many as 60 institutions — government and private — may become involved in the process.

The new Bill was tabled in the House of Representatives by Prime Minister Andrew Holness last Tuesday, and among the major changes proposed are the removal of the mandatory requirement for NIDS identification, as well as the meeting of the select committee to hear submissions from the public and their institutions.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling in April 2019 that sections of the original Bill, which was passed in 2018, were unconstitutional, the Government had announced its intention to withdraw that 2017 Bill and replace it with a new one by the end of 2020.

Tabling the Bill last week, Holness said that the court’s decision may have been triggered by the fact that the objectives of the previous Bill were “not well understood,

maybe not have been well communicated, and probably was misconstrued”.

“I believe that we now have legislation before us which is informed by a policy that went through a very robust process of interrogation, analysis and debate,” he stated.

The select committee is comprised of Members of Parliament (MPS) Chuck, chairman; Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte; Minister of Education, Youth and Information Fayval Williams and state minister in the same ministry, Robert Morgan; state minister in the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service, Marsha Smith; and Dwight Sibbles.

Also appointed from the House of Representatives are the Opposition’s Julian Robinson, MP for St Andrew South Eastern, MP for St Catherine North Western Hugh Graham, and Lothian Cousins, MP for Clarendon South Western.

Committee members from the Senate are: Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade and Leader of Government Business Kamina Johnson Smith; Aubyn Hill, minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation; and Government senators Ransford Braham and Charles Sinclair; and for the Opposition, Donna Scott Mottley and Peter Bunting.