And the Cabinet also spoke about constitutional reform. The PM told our hosts that there are some parts of the constitution that are antiquated and after 4 decades of independence, need to be revamped. He explained that those in the Cabinet feel the same and they will be working on establishing a People's Constitutional Commission.
Hon. John Briceno, Prime Minister
"There's a very important discussion that we have and there's a strong sense within Cabinet that we need to do some sort of constitutional reform. Here we are, 40 years later from independence and we need to look at are we satisfied with the governance that we have. The constitution has been designed almost around two dominant political parties and you have the PUP and the UDP and these are the things that we need to question and look at the structures that we have in governance. We need to review them, we set up the structures in a different era, here we are 40 years later, the world is changing, technology has been changing everything. There's a feeling that we need to deepen the democracy within our country, there's a feeling that there has to be more participation by people in governing. Because the truth is, once a party is elected, they're there for 5 years and in some instances that they can do almost whatever they wish and there's not much we can do unless we have a revolution and use the military which is something we never want to have, civil unrest and people get killed, that's not the direction Belize wants to go so we have to find a way to deepen the governance, finding ways people can feel like they have a say in the decisions of the government, so we believe we're talking about setting up a people's constitutional commission. I know we've been talking about it since September last year but we had a lengthy discussion in cabinet and so we will be shortly setting that up, include both political parties, include the private sector, include social partners, the NGO communities, so that we can have a discussion and we want to target it, say have 1 year of discussion and another between 3and 6 months to put that together and then to present it to the cabinet and then to the people and so that's something very important that had a lot of discussion during the reach."
