A few weeks ago NPO's and NGO's from all across the nation were rallying against G.O.B's proposed NPO Bill, a bill that sought to probe much closer into their activities to safeguard against money laundering and foreign remittances provided to them.
It's a cause that was taken up by NGO Senator Janelle Chanona as well as activist Caleb Orozco and Belize Network of NGO's member Dr Elma Kay. Their argument was that the bill sought to take away some of the freedoms enjoyed by their organizations and gave the government too much power to limit their activities.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister gave us an update on where we are:
Reporter:
"Has anything has been sorted out in relation to the Non-profit Organization Bill, I know that there will be other legislation taken to the house on Friday regarding that."
John Briceno, Prime Minister Of Belize
"Yes, I think a lot of it has been addressed I don't know the details, um, but we have met with them and also I think that in many instances with the NPO bill, um, many of the people that were objecting were not fully aware of where they were and to where in effect that we were making it easier for them probably again, these bills, this along with the other bills that we were going to introduce are not bills that we just took off the air, it's bills that are kind of being imposed on us by the more developed countries and the FFAT will be built, will be coming to Belize to do another review in December, and what they are saying previously governments used to pass legislation but not implement, they are saying we don't want you to just pass it into legislation we want to see implementation. That is why now all of these bills, we have to try to pass it by May, by the end of May or early June and the idea is that we will have these other 5 months to work on the implementation. We take no pleasure in doing these things because it is becoming costly for us as a country but we cannot afford to be blacklisted as the European Union and these other countries, we should be able to protect the little correspondent bankings relations that we have since they started all of this Belize has lost about 85% of the relationships that we have. So, the few that we have we have to protect it."
