Foreign Minister wants to include Civil society in decision making
While leaders have placed great emphasis on the global economy, free trade and Cuba, the discussions did not exclude those in the Civil Society, the private sector and indigenous peoples. When our team on special assignment spoke with him earlier today, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Wilfred Elrington, shared that the main point that resonated from the participants was the desire for inclusion and more opportunities to benefit from the wealth produced in the region. But for this to happen, Elrington said there needs to be a shift in the way things are traditionally done.
Wilfred Elrington, Minister of Foreign Affairs
“They’re saying look we don’t want promises, we want you to introduce some mechanisms to implement these promises, some monitoring to ensure that these promises are implemented, these undertakings are really implanted. Final analysis is initial is to whether those intuition are going to be set up rest really with the governments of the region, the Americas. The O.A.S., of course will be looked at as the implementing agency organization for the American States, they are gonna be looked at as the implementing agency, particular for this conference, the summit but of course the O.A.S. is made up of the members of the region. The decisions are normally taken by the leaders, ultimately they determined what the O.A.S. will and they determined what you can do by providing finances for it. So if in fact we set up those mechanisms that will have to be determined by the leaders of the region, the Prime Minister and the presidents that are attending the summit.”
William Neal
“On coming that members of the Civil Society is talking about the fact that the declaration is not shared with them to have meaning full participation. The parallel forums that are being held, is it more tokenism than a real participation at this point?”
Wilfred Elrington
“No, no, it really is a genuine matter. My whole experiences is that all that goes on at the summit prepared for, before the summit. So even as we speak now, we have the ambassadors and other higher officials putting together the final declaration, the final position which is going to be deliberated upon by the heads tomorrow and ultimately and made public but it cannot be made public properly before the heads, in fact signs off on it.”
Hazel Brown, Civil Society Rep.
“There has not been the participation of civil society even though it has be included in many of the mandates of the O.A.S., have not really come to pass because they have been implement in an ad hoc fashion. So we’re looking in the future and come out of the summit for an institutionalized mechanism for participation. And we say participation, we don’t just mean coming to meetings, we’re talking about, for example, mobilizing our resources for N.G.O.s to function, we’re talking about participation in monitoring especially of the implementation of the recommendations that come out of here because our experiences as well have been in the last four summits. There were six hundred thirty-four mandates have been made in the last four and many of them have not been implemented and so you would have heard me say in the end there that we’ve developed an instrument, a tool for measuring government’s implementation of the mandates and the Caribbean Civil Society obligation is to participate in it.”
