Constitutional bill in limbo
Published:Wednesday | July 16, 2025 | 12:11 AM
With the current parliamentary term ending on or before September 14, 2025, the Constitution (Amendment) (Republic) Bill, 2024 will not be debated and voted on by lawmakers before Jamaicans go to the polls to elect a new government.
The bill will fall off Parliament’s order paper and will have to be reintroduced when a new session of the legislature is convened after the general election.
A joint select committee has been reviewing the bill and was expected to submit a report to Parliament on its deliberations.
Members of the legislature are now on summer break, and it is unlikely that they will reconvene before the current life of the Parliament ends.
Constitutional expert Dr Lloyd Barnett said the current bill before Parliament is in “limbo or almost dead because it can’t be passed again in this Parliament”.
“The only circumstances in which a constitutional bill can survive is if it passed through the House of Representatives already then it could survive to the next Parliament,” Barnett told The Gleaner yesterday.
RETABLING BILL
The constitutional scholar argued that if the ruling Jamaica Labour Party wins the upcoming elections, it would just retable the bill and continue with the committee hearing.
The Opposition People’s National Party has said that it would not proceed with the current process unless the Caribbean Court of Justice’s appellate jurisdiction is accepted.
According to Barnett, the PNP position suggests that it would carry out a new examination and reformulation of the constitutional proposals.
When Minister of Legal and Constitutional Affairs Marlene Malahoo Forte tabled the bill in the Lower House in December 2024, she said the move “marks the greatest progress made so far in our effort to reform the Constitution of Jamaica to achieve the national goals of having a Jamaican as head of state instead of the hereditary British monarch and also having our supreme law taken out from under the cloak of the imperial Order in Council and placed in proper form”.
The bill also proposes to entrench the Electoral Commission of Jamaica in the Constitution, incorporate national symbols and emblems, clarify Jamaican citizenship criteria, and strengthen constitutional amendment procedures.
Attempts to get a comment from Malahoo Forte were unsuccessful as her phone rang without answer.