AT the last Caricom Heads of Government conference in Georgetown, regional leaders agreed that ’household domestics who have obtained a Caribbean Vocational Qualification or equivalent qualification will be allowed to move within the region with effect from January. They had also agreed that ’in the spirit of the Revised Treaty’ (of Chaguaramas) and the requisites of international law, all migrants should be accorded humane treatment.

Further to this, the summit proclaimed that an established schedule of free movement of persons within the Single Market ’would be reviewed, with a view a view to advising on the timetable for full free movement’.

Such a review was to have taken place at a ’convocation’ on the CSME to which these leaders had also pledged themselves in Guyana, and which was set for this month, in Bridgetown, Barbados. They had agreed to that convocation, on the basis of a report from a group known as the Audit of the Single Market Implementation, to involve all stakeholders.

All of this had taken place against the backdrop of the fretting which had led up to the Georgetown summit, over the moves made by the Barbados government to manage what it held to be unchecked immigration into that country by undocumented Caricom nationals. In the main, the presumed influx was seen to be coming from Guyana.

Whereas, however, Georgetown 2009 was still talking about deciding ’a timetable for full implementation’ of the free movement commitments as part of the CSME, a previous summit, St Lucia 2005, had decided that full free movement would have been arrived at by 2009, with all categories of Caribbean nationals afforded such rights.

Also in Georgetown, the Barbados Prime Minister stood on solid ground the day before the summit opened, when he provided details at a news conference about his government’s incontrovertible commitment to the CSME and to the full ’Caricom project’ for that matter. He was lamenting, nevertheless, the absence of progress on the legal and social infrastructure which ought to have been in place a long time now to accompany the movement of Caricom nationals from one country to another.

It was in 2003, at a conference of the Caribbean Conference of Labour (CCL) in Paramaribo, Suriname, that his predecessor in office had outlined what was necessary concerning the set of ’contingent rights’ and ’neighbouring rights’ which had to be established across regional borders. That CCL triennial conference had as its theme, the free movement objective and its importance for the operation of the CSME.

Jacqueline Jack attended that conference as a member of the CCL’s governing council. By October 2009, in her capacity now as President of the CCL, she was expressing genuine frustration at the rate of progress with the CSME, and the free movement as a vital component of it. That the President of the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce was also to lambaste the absence of real resolve on the issue should shame the leaders into quickening their pace.

The Georgetown summit had also agreed on what the leaders said was ’the importance of training and sensitisng immigration officers on the implementation of the region’s approach to free movement and hassle-free travel.’ This comes three years after the trial run that was put in place for the historic Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean.

At a panel discussion this week, organised as part of Accountants’ Week, one of the speakers told the gathering of a scenario in which members of Trinidad and Tobago’s Institute of Chartered Accountants are being ’blocked’ from doing work in other Caricom countries. The ICATT President said, in response, this was an issue discussed at a meeting of Caribbean chartered accountants in Miami last week. He said the meeting placed its hopes in the implementation of the CSME.

Trinidad and Tobago, however, has several areas of vulnerability on what its government has been agreeing to on the free movement issue.

Responding to questions in May this year, concerning the region’s reactions to the moves by the government in Barbados, the Prime Minister said there was the ’soft approach’ which his government was taking on this issue, consistent with the ’spirit’ of the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas.

A young Jamaican man who was summarily denied entry two months ago, on his way to be the best man in his brother’s wedding would have a different story to tell.

The Minister of National Security is also being asked to apply the same ’humane’ treatment of which the Georgetown declaration speaks, in the case of an increasing number of would-be immigrants from African countries now being held at the country’s prisons. And the country’s Industrial Relations Act still excludes domestic workers as workers under the law here.