ANTIGUA
AND BARBUDA
First, second, and third
periodic reports dated 26 September 1995
Antigua and Barbuda,
or simply Antigua, as the country is mainly known, became independent
from Britain in 1981. A third, uninhabited island called Redonda
is also part of the country, which in all has a total land area
of 440 square miles. Antigua, where the bulk of the country's
66,000 or so people live, takes about ninety minutes to cross,
from top to bottom. Although its tropical marine climate and
sandy beaches have made it, along with the other islands of
the Caribbean, an earthly paradise in the imagination of many,
mainly Western, visitors, the reality is that Antigua has negligible
natural resources, little arable land, very limited fresh water
and is subject to severe hurricaines and tropical storms. As
one British travel writer concedes, the sugar plantations may
have faded away, but colonialism assumes many forms, and "the
bittersweetness of upmarket tourism" is now the centre of the
island's economy .1
One family dynasty
has controlled the fortunes of Antigua since the mid-1940s,
when Vere C. Bird came to prominence in the country's first
labour union and became the president of the Antigua Labour
Party (ALP) in 1943. The U.S. State Department, in the main
extremely reticent in its description of the politics of Antigua,
concedes that "the opposition has charged that the ALP's longstanding
monopoly on patronage and its influence over access to economic
opportunities make it extremely difficult for opposition parties
to attract membership and financial support."2
One of Antigua's
two non-religious radio stations and its only television station
is owned by the government, while the other radio station is
owned by the Prime Minister's brother. Another brother is the
principal owner of the only cable television company.3 When Antigua's only daily newspaper -- which
is independent -- tried to start a radio station, the police
shut it down. Abuses of free speech provisions in the Constitution,
ostensibly in the interests of public order, have limited free
speech, and have helped the Bird family maintain its grip on
political power.4
Members of the Bird
family and government officials have been implicated in drug
and gun-running operations, and recently Antigua has been identified
as one of the world's centres for off-shore banking, where much
of the criminal world's money-laundering takes place.5 According to one journalist who writes often
about the Caribbean, "over time...his critics charge, Mr. Bird
and his sons, including Lester, the current Prime Minister,
have made Antigua a haven for fast-buck artists and con-men...;
meanwhile, the critics say, the Birds use their own share of
the loot to maintain themselves in power."6
However, strict anti-money laundering legislation was passed
last December in Antigua. By that time, about fifty-seven off-shore
banks had been established.7
Off-shore banking,
however, did not spring up in a vacuum. Antigua's economy, along
with other nations in the Caribbean, is being badly affected
by the ending of preferential trade agreements with Europe.
In March 1997 the World Trade Organization Disputes Panel ruled
in favour of the U.S., or rather in favour of the large U.S.
owned banana plantations in Latin America, that the European
Union's preferential agreements with the Caribbean and Pacific
States violated open trading rules.8
Banana production is important to the economies of several Caribbean
countries, but they cannot hope to compete with the U.S. plantations.
The first of several meetings to examine new conditions in world
trade and the vulnerabilities of the Cariforum states of the
Caribbean took place in Tobago in April following the WTO decision.9
Throughout the Caribbean
there is growing concern over the importance of inter-regional
trade to promote economic growth and increased food security.
Between 1988 and 1992, Antigua's food import bill nearly doubled.
Although Antiguq does produce food for local consumption, agriculture
and industry only account for about twenty percent of GDP, while
services are almost seventy-five percent. Like the rest of the
Caribbean, Antigua for some time has identified tourism as its
engine of growth. The number of tourists to the Caribbean has
tripled in twenty years.
However, while tourism
accounts for about forty percent of Antigua's economy, it is
one of the islands of the Caribbean where local people have
very little control over their major industry. Hotel ownership
in Jamaica and Barbados, for example, has passed mainly into
local hands. Ninety percent of the resorts in Antigua are still
owned by foreigners, and, according to a recent report in The
Guardian, few Antiguans are in top management positions.10
The need for local production to be integrated into the tourist
industry is vital to the health of the economy, and this includes
making better use of the island's human resource base. Although
this has been recognized for some time, efforts to link farmers
and fishermen, craftspeople and small-scale manufacturers with
hotels has been very slow in taking shape.
A UNDP-funded study
back in 1980 identified several plausible local links with tourist
hotels that could be developed.11 However, the leader of Antigua's opposition party complains
that the development that has come through tourism "...is not
in our hands. We can't lay a foundation on which we benefit."12
To attract tourists
and investors, Antigua must continue to provide a semblance
of paradise, and this includes a local population who are forever
friendly, and if they are poor, as many are, discreet about
their poverty. One commentator noted that "there appears to
be a deep-seated resentment of the industry at every level of
society."13 It was recently reported in an opposition
weekly that the Prime Minister himself was once refused entry
into Club Antigua, one of the island's "all-inclusive" hotels,
because he did not have a pass and was not recognized by a security
guard. For the locals on these tourist islands, "all-inclusives"
could more accurately be called "all-excluding."14 The article noted wryly that "once the people of Antigua
had to have a pass to be out of doors after the ringing of a
church bell at night."15
TEMPORARY SPECIAL
MEASURES - Convention Article 4
The Antigua government
report (CEDAW/C/ANT/1-3), dated September 1995, states that
the upgrading of the Women's Desk to a Directorate of Women's
Affairs in 1985 was thought of as the most visible and meaningful
effort the government could make to address the concerns of
women. It goes on to say that "the Government is currently in
the process of appointing adquate staff to facilitate effecting
functioning of this body."16
According to the recent U.S. State Department Human Rights Report,
there has been little evidence that the promises made by the
government for the advancement of women are being taken seriously.
The Directorate of Women's Affairs has apparently achieved very
little.
VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN - Convention Articles 3, 5, 6, 12, 15 and 16
One source states
that domestic violence in Antigua is "endemic and is widely
recognized as a social problem."17 As often occurs elsewhere in the world, the police are usually
reluctant to intervene in domestic disputes, and the courts
have a reputation for being lenient in these cases, which in
turn helps to perpetuate the violence by discouraging women
from coming forward to press charges.
EDUCATION - Convention
Article 10
A study carried
out twelve years ago by the Antigua-based Caribbean Family Planning
Affiliation (CFPA) corroborated what the average Antiguan probably
already knew, which was that becoming pregnant while still in
school usually meant the end of a girl's education.18 The seriousness of this problem for the
society is reflected in the overall figures, from a 1990 study,
that claimed twenty-five to thirty percent of all births in
the Commonwealth Caribbean were to teenage mothers.19 Some say there is evidence that a girl who drops out of school
due to pregnancy at age thirteen is likely to have her second
child by the time she is fifteen.20 The chief executive officer of CFPA has been quoted as saying
"...the best way to prevent teenage pregnancy...is to provide
young ladies with the opportunity to remain in school."21
However, the chief
of CFPA added that the difficulty in empowering girls either
to "just say no," or to manage sexuality responsibly is that
so many factors are involved. As mentioned under Article 12
below, there is some doubt that education, in itself, was a
significant factor in the rapidly declining fertility rate in
Antigua that began in the 1960s. There is little disagreement,
however, throughout the world, that among the poor, female-headed
households form a significant portion. In Surinam about twenty
percent of households are headed by women. In Jamaica it is
about forty-six percent, but Antigua is one of the highest,
with an average of nearly fifty-nine percent female-headed households.22
Education may be
only one of a complex of factors that help young women to avoid
poverty as a single-parent, but it is at least an important
factor, and attitudes about how to deal ith teenage pregnancy
have been softening in Antigua since the CFPA study was made.
There are NGO-initiated efforts in Antigua to provide alternative
secondary or continuation programmes to teenage mothers, but
it is unclear how much support there is for these programmes
in government. If the 1996 U.S. State Department report is accurate,
the government promised "in previous years" to provide better
programmes and educational opportunities, as well as family
planning programmes, but does not seem to have taken any action.
At least there were no initiatives during the year the State
Department report was being written.
EMPLOYMENT - Convention
Article 11
Despite the government's
failure in the past to show real political will to promote the
advancement of women, some people feel that as the importance
of inter-regional trade grows, there is increased awareness
of the need to provide services and generally to upgrade the
women "hucksters" who are the backbone of inter-island trading.23
Unfortunately, as
the Government report readily admits, women occupy mainly menial
positions in the tourist industry. There is a hotel training
school run by the Ministry of Tourism, but IWRAW was not able
to determine in time whether this school has targeted women
for higher level training or has a quota of any kind.
HEALTH CARE AND
FAMILY PLANNING - Convention Article 12
Fertility declined
in Antigua from the mid-1960s and reached replacement level
in the late 1980s.24 During
the period when total fertility was falling -- from a high in
the 1950s of about 7.0 to a low of about 1.7 in 1988 -- wages
doubled, infant mortality declined, the proportion of women
who completed secondary school rose from three percent to about
fifty percent. One source states, however, that the fertility
decline in Antigua was not about education so much as "the conjunction
of new educational and employment opportunities for women...",
itself part of the structural transformation in the Antiguan
economy, freeing women from dependency on their children and
on men.25 Said another
way, women were no longer limited to "childbearing as an investment
activity."
Effective contraception
technologies have been available in Antigua since World War
II. It is said that Antigua's Family Planning Association, however,
has not been very effective in distributing this technology
or contraceptive information to those who may have needed help
to access it.26 The most
recent U.S. State Department Human Rights Report says that the
government has promised for some years to provide better programmes
of all sorts, including family planning services, "but has failed
to implement any new programmes during 1996." Given the dire
economic and social consequences that often entrap teenage mothers,
this is a failure that can have lasting social and economic
consequences for the society.
MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
LAW - Convention Article 16
Nowhere is the Antigua
Government report (CEDAW/C/ANT/1-3) to CEDAW more surprising,
and disappointing, than in the section (mistakenly identified
in the report as Article 14) concerning marriage and family
law. Since Antigua is reporting to CEDAW for the first time,
one would have expected at least some discussion of the important
social legislation that has been passed since its independence
from Britain in 1981.27
Three family statutes
were passed by 1987: the Births Act, the Intestate Estates Act
and the Status of Children Act. The first allows men to register
and legitimize children born outside marriage; the second enables
children legitimized in this way to inherit from their father's
estates (a right they did not have under colonial law); and
the Status of Children Act prohibits discrimination against
illegitimate children. These laws, enacted in similar forms
in other Caribbean states somewhat earlier than in Antigua,
represent a validation of the local kinship system, and an important
shift "in the distribution of power between the state, the churches,
and the schools."28
While the Antigua
government report states, rather dismissively, that "non-marital
unions are mainly to be found in the lower socio-economic strata...,"29
children born outside of registered marriage constitute a majority
of the population, and it is precisely this equation between
illegitimacy and subordinate status that the legislation seeks
to redress. "Discrimination against illegitimate children is
naturalized, institutionalized, and perpetuated in Christian
schools and churches-- in direct opposition [now] to the State."30
As in the past,
the marriage rate in Antigua remains very low. According to
one source, 4.5 per 1000 in 1987.31 Marriage is valued in Antiguan society, but parenting outside
of marriage is also valued. "Long-term nonlegal relationships
are deeply rooted in the past, and these practices prevail alongside
formalized unions. ...As in Jamaica, families [in Antigua] are
generally large and include complicated alliances that cross
social class."32
The passage of the
Births Act and the Status of Children Act has made it easier
for illegitimate children to secure legal documents and to attend
certain schools -- since the passage of the Status of Children
Act in 1987, the threat of public exposure has forced the headmasters
of at least three secondary schools to enroll illegitimate children33 -- but the new legislation has also proved
contentious and has not been altogether popular.
According to Antiguan
attorney Sharon Walter in 1991, "prior to the Status of Children
Act...it was commonly accepted that the mother of an illegitimate
child had the right to legal custody of that child unless the
Court, in considering the welfare of the child, ordered that
some other person should have custody....That position may now
have changed since the Status of Children Act provides that
'the status and the rights and obligations of the parents...of
a child born out of wedlock are the same as if the child were
born in wedlock...' This would seem to indicate that the parents
would, as in the case of legitimate children, have joint custody
of their offspring. This is a controversial issue and there
are presently differing schools of thought on the issue."34 When this was written, no text case had
been brought before the High Court, but there were several cases
in which the Act was being evoked to assert the rights of unmarried
men over their children. While the Act could help those unmarried
women who bear the main financial and social burden of raising
their children, it could also be used in some cases as a weapon
to control them. Also, the Intestate Estates Act could have
unwelcome consequences for women who are legally married but
whose husbands have illegitimate children.
Given the enormous
potential impact of these new laws on women, it is important
that the Antiguan government delegation to CEDAW provide an
up to date assessment of how they have been used in the courts
and any measurable impact they may have had up to the present.
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