Magna Carta and Human Rights

• Author: Hamid A. Ghany
• Profession: Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine
• Pages: 49-63

3.

Magna Carta and Human

Rights

Introduction

The whole history of the African population of the West Indies inevitably

drives them towards representative institutions fashioned after the British

model. Transplanted by the slave trade or other circumstances to foreign

soil, losing in the process their social system, language and traditions, and

with the exception of some relics of obeah, whatever religion they may

have had, they owe everything that they have now, and all that they are, to

the British race that first enslaved them, and subsequently to its honour

restored to them their freedom. Small wonder if they look for political

growth to the only source and pattern that they know, and aspire to share

in what has been the peculiarly British gift of representative institutions.1

This excerpt from Major Wood’s 1922 report best encapsulates the story

of how the principles of Magna Carta came to be included in the later

constitutions of the former colonies of the British West Indies and had

been excluded before. Major Wood (later Lord Halifax) was expressing a

view that confirmed the superiority factor that underscored much of the

political thought that drove the slave trade and slavery in the British West

Indies.

Such political thought was devoid of any reference to Magna Carta as the

basis for the organization of slave society and its sustenance. Indeed, most

of the constitutional law texts on the Commonwealth Caribbean make

absolutely no mention of Magna Carta whatsoever with the exception

of Sir Fred Phillips’s Commonwealth Caribbean Constitutional Law in

which he argues that the foundations of the protection of the right to life,

the right to personal liberty, the right to the protection of property, and

the right to due process of law were established for Caribbean societies

through Magna Carta.2

The significance of this fact is that many constitutional law scholars in

the region have not made the connection between Magna Carta and many

of the human rights features of Commonwealth Caribbean constitutions.