(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) His Excellency Edwin Carrington, Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretary-General on Thursday urged regional security ministers attending the Tenth Meeting of the Council for National Security and Law Enforcement (CONSLE) in Antigua and Barbuda, to work towards making the CARICOM Single Market a “zone of peace.”

The Secretary-General said that such a designation would “continue to attract visitors to our shores and would be one that “demonstrates to the world what can be achieved by small countries working together, to be competitive in the global arena.” Presided over by Dr. the Honourable Errol Cort, Minister of National Security and Labour of Antigua and Barbuda, the meeting was expected to advance discussions towards the establishment and implementation of a Regional Resource Mobilisation Framework for crime and security, which the Secretary-General said, must help the Region define its security priorities.

He said that the Region’s security structure must be “one that made would, among other things, continue to attract visitors to our shores and one that demonstrates to the world what can be achieved by small countries working together, to be competitive in the global arena.”

“The structure must provide an opportunity for helping the Region to define its priorities more concretely and to lay the foundations for creating sustainable partnerships, to implement an agenda that must include institutional strengthening, capacity building, border security and enhanced information and communication systems,” Mr. Carrington said.

The 10th Meeting of CONSLE comes on the heels of a special meeting with the United States of America (USA) Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in Barbados and the Joint CARICOM/US Forum on the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative in Washington DC.

Mr. Carrington stated that the Community had accorded an important role to crime and security as the fourth pillar of CARICOM, therefore, it was necessary for CONSLE to streamline programmes and to make the new management structure function more effectively. The CARICOM Secretary-General asserted that the peoples of the Caribbean expected their leaders to secure their future and as such they should be given no less.

He pointed to significant items on the crime and security agenda that should be addressed decisively in order to create that safer Community. Those include the proposed establishment and implementation of a Regional Resource Mobilisation Framework for crime and security; the Crime prevention strategy which represents a partnership between the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ( UNODC ) and CARICOM, and the impending CARICOM Travel Pass (CARIPASS).

Mr Carrington said CARIPASS “offers a very exciting prospect for utilising the newer information technologies to facilitate easier passage of CARICOM nationals through the immigration process, while at the same time offering to make our borders much more secure by providing comprehensive checks and balances.”

Noting the challenges involved in implementing CARIPASS, Mr Carrington explained that while other countries such as the UK, Singapore, Canada and the Cayman Islands had implemented electronic devices that had helped to revamp their immigration processes, none had so far faced the challenge of operating a cross border system among the many states that formed the Caribbean Community.

The Secretary-General encouraged the ministers to focus their deliberations on operational matters, particularly on ways in which programmes being coordinated and implemented by the Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (IMPACS) and SEPACS could be streamlined.

CONTACT: piu@caricom.org