Provide clarity on Shiprider before closing deal
KAMINA JOHNSON Smith’s announcement of the strong progress made in the six weeks since Jamaica began negotiating with the United States for a revision of the Shiprider Agreement speaks, it would suggest, to the quality of Jamaica’s diplomacy and the merit to the argument it put to Washington. Nonetheless, before the foreign minister signs off on the revised agreement, she should take two further steps.
Mrs Johnson Smith should provide at least the broad outlines, if not the details, of the concerns she presented to Washington, and to which of these the Americans acquiesced. That can happen when negotiating in the open, which, no doubt, will be the argument made against the suggestion. Countries do this all the time – making their negotiating briefs public. This approach will allow for a public appreciation of whether core concerns are being addressed and lessen the likelihood of post facto controversies over the pact, whose application is often contentious.
Further, the foreign minister should clarify whether the recent negotiations were, indeed, the starting point of the review, and if they were, why if took a year and a half when, under pressure from a previous incident, she had promised to get them going.
Aimed primarily at curbing narcotics smuggling at sea, shiprider agreements allow the United States and signatory partners to intercept each other’s boats in international waters and, with permission, board and search such vessels. They can, with the appropriate green light, pursue suspect vessels into each other’s territorial waters. Jamaican law also allows the island to waive its right of prosecution, in domestic courts, of its citizens caught with contraband.
PERIODIC CONTROVERSY
The periodic controversy over how Jamaica exercises that exception and the nature of America’s enforcement of the Shiprider Agreement, blew up again in mid-2019 when it emerged that the American Civil Liberties Union (UCLU) was suing the US government on behalf of five Jamaica fishermen because of their treatment, two years earlier, aboard US Coast Guard ships. They had been held in Haitian waters on suspicion of trafficking narcotics. The men spent time in a US jail, ostensibly for lying to federal officials. Before their convictions, though, they claim that for weeks they were moved from vessel to vessel, often shackled on the decks of ships , exposed to the elements.
At the time, Mrs Johnson Smith promised a review of the Shiprider Agreement and said that talks were being opened with the United States. Over the next year and a half there were no updates. Then there was the latest incident in December, involving the Jamaican vessel Lady Lawla and its four-member crew.
The vessel was held in international waters and the crew prosecuted for drug smuggling, but a Florida judge held that what the US Coast Guard thought was liquid cocaine was, in fact, 150 gallons of fuel. In addition to the prosecution of its crew, the Americans sunk the vessel at sea. It was the same boat that a Jamaican judge, in 2014, ruled that the Jamaica Defence Force had no right to allow Americans to board and search while it was docked in a Jamaican port five years earlier. At the time, the cargo found on the vessel was fish.
REFNING THE DEAL
In a mid-January statement in the Senate, Mrs Johnson Smith spoke of refining the agreement to deal with the issues raised by the Lady Lawla incident without any clear reference to the 2019 matter. Further, on Friday, she disclosed a January 6 meeting between Jamaican and US officials “to further review the operational procedures associated with implementation of the agreement”.
The Americans, the foreign minister said, had accepted many of Jamaica’s proposals for improving the operations of the agreement and that it had already been reached on most others. “A meeting is now being scheduled between the parties to iron out the handful of issues where there still remains a difference of opinion,” she said. It would be good if there was a sense of what these new protocols will look like before they are locked in.
While the speed with which these negotiations appear to have taken place since the beginning of January is impressive, it begs the question of why nothing, or very little, happened before then. The Lady Lawla incident might have been avoided if the energy of the last six weeks was evident a year and a half ago.