Harrison Henry retiring as public defender

Public Defender Arlene Harrison Henry is to retire this week after serving for seven years in the post.

But the woman who was appointed in January 2015 – following the 2014 retirement of Earl Witter – is not yet ready to step back from the field to which she has given so many years advocating for the underprivileged and those who suffer human rights abuses.

“I will always be involved in human rights activities,” she declared to The Sunday Gleaner in an interview. “The Independent Jamaican Council for Human Rights is closest and dearest to my heart.”

Harrison Henry attended Immaculate Conception High School before enrolling at The University of the West Indies, Mona, to study political science and another year undertaking graduate studies. She then went on to study law at the Cave Hill, Barbados, campus of the regional university.

“As a government scholar, I was required to come back and work within the government service, which I did, both at the Ministry of Justice and at the Attorney General’s Chambers,” she said on a trip down memory lane.

After those requirements were fulfilled, she went into private practice.

“So I made the full circle joining the government service, going into private practice, and now coming back in working for a commission of Parliament. I have enjoyed my stint at the Office of the Public Defender; we have done a great deal of work and the work with the communities. That was most rewarding,” she said.

Harrison Henry gave credit to those who helped her to shape a career in law and public service.

“I have had many mentors from human right champions like Queen’s Counsel R. Carl Rattray, with whom I first worked after leaving law school,” Harrison Henry shared.

She said that Rattray, a late former president of the Court of Appeal, was her first teacher.

Another of her former mentors, Dennis Daly, QC, was also a human rights champion.

“I was nurtured by some giants and was the beneficiary of kindness of persons in the profession who moulded me in my natural inclinations,” she said.

Harrison Henry explained that as a product of a Roman Catholic high school for girls, she and other students were always involved in summer camps in poor Kingston and rural communities assisting with social work.

She would often give service at a small clinic, under the guidance of a nurse, wetting her feet in community activism from her high school days and igniting a flame to help those whose voices were not strong enough.

“I think at the end of the day, I am the one who is the beneficiary and I am the one who had the great honour to have served and I will continue to serve because that is the duty placed upon us who have received all the blessings and goodness of this small island that we love so much, and much is expected of us and I will continue to serve,” she emphasised.

Work will continue

As she looks to depart, Harrison Henry noted that the work of the office will continue.

“There are outstanding studies here that must be completed by whoever takes my place. One of the studies has to be the conditions within our public hospitals, where it seems having a baby can be a dangerous operation,” she said.

“We have seen too many of those cases come to us, where women go to hospital to have a child – that appears to us to be something quite normal – and they go in and suffer all sorts of nightmares such as coming out without the babies, and at times, the women are dead,” she said, referring to two recent high-profile cases involving late mothers Jodian Fearon, 23, and Shanique Armstrong, 27.

There was significant public outrage over the cases, which Harrison Henry believes point to a “systemic problem within our public institutions when it comes to women and the care that women need when they go into these public facilities to have babies”.

She added: “It seems like a normal sort of thing to do, but many women do not have that kind of joy of experience that one is expected to have from childbirth, and that is a study that has to be done because there seem to be some systemic problem within our healthcare [system] that results in disaster in some cases.”

Deputy Public Defender Herbert McKenzie, who will act in the top post until a permanent replacement is identified, describes Harrison Henry as a champion for human rights and one who is dedicated to the cause.

“She is a very experienced lawyer whose quality has inured greatly to the benefit of the office,” he said.

“She has an open-door policy and she generally believes that everybody in the office is equal. The office will definitely miss her,” he told The Sunday Gleaner.

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