Acting as Provost Marshall Commissioner of Police Ellison Greenslade read the election proclamation on the steps of the Supreme Court yesterday afternoon.
Bill 1 seeks to achieve gender equality in a very important respect: it seeks to give a child born outside The Bahamas to a Bahamian-born mother and non-Bahamian father the same automatic right to Bahamian citizenship that the Constitution already gives to a child born outside The Bahamas to a Bahamian-born father and a non-Bahamian mother. The bill is therefore simply equalizing the sexes and, in so doing, eliminating an area of discrimination against women that has persisted for the past 41 years.
Bill 2 also seeks to achieve gender equality in another respect under the Constitution: it seeks to enable a Bahamian woman who marries a foreign man to secure for him the same access to Bahamian citizenship that a Bahamian man has always enjoyed under the Constitution in relation to his foreign spouse. In short, the bill seeks to achieve gender equality in this regard.
Bill 3 is of particular interest because it seeks to remediate the one area of the Constitution that discriminates against men. At present, an unwed Bahamian father cannot pass his citizenship to a child born to a foreign woman. This bill seeks to change that. It will give an unwed Bahamian father the same right to pass citizenship to his child that a Bahamian woman has always had under the Constitution in relation to a child born to her out of wedlock.
Bill 4 seeks to end discrimination based on sex. This involves the insertion of the word “sex” in Article 26 of the Constitution so as to make it unconstitutional to discriminate based on whether someone is male or female.
The proclamation which must be declared within 21 days of the referendum essentially sets in motion the June 7th referendum.