NYC hosts one-day seminar

President of the National Youth Council NYC, Michael Johnson, has urged young people to make a greater input into the process of constitutional review.

Johnson who addressed participants at a one-day seminar on Constitution Review, the Caribbean Single Market and Economy, CSME and Caribbean Court of Justice, CCJ stressed that young people need to realise that these issues would eventually affect them. {{more}}Johnson noted that soon they would become adults and have to live in the society that was created for them by adults of yester-year. The youth president advised that if young people say what they would like to see in the constitution now, they would make their society better.

Facilitator at the workshop, politician Robbie Fitz Patrick, outlined some of the issues where young people could make their voices heard if they become more involved in the constitutional review process. He said one of the concerns expressed by the populace is when leaders of the country are the only ones to set a date for election when their term of office is due.

Fitz Patrick stressed that politicians have the fixed date in their heads and continue to use it as a “Trump Card” to spring the election dates so that they could win. He asked whether such an important date in the democracy of any country should not be set so that voters could prepare themselves and get registered in time for election, similar to what the United States practices.

The other facilitators were lawyers Jomo Thomas who spoke on the CSME and Bertram Commissiong (QC) who dealt with the CCJ. Caribbean Community, CARICOM Youth Ambassador Kyle De Freitas was also in attendance at the one day seminar, which was held under the theme, “Youth take a stand on issues at hand for 2005 and beyond”