Dear Editor,
Two weeks before the NBA All- Star Game which took place last February, a storm without peer broke loose in the basketball world and arguably also in the larger field of international sports, and such especially because of the turn it took. The first swing in what became like a heated debate was taken by the duo of LeBron James and Kevin Durant, two of the most famous basketball players of their generation.
In an interview they had a couple of days before the All-Star Game, they had expressed very sharp criticism on the actual president of the US, Donald Trump and his style of performing politics.
In her turn, Laura Ingraham, host of the Fox News, which is the major TV channel/ protagonist of the conservatives in the States, reacted with a very personal attack against LeBron and Kevin. She told them, among others, to “shut up and dribble”, particularly because, according to her, they do not even have enough education to dare mess with politics.
Kevin answered Laura, calling her attack racist, as there were various white celebrities in the basketball world who also have criticized Trump without Laura attacking them. And LeBron just said that he did not worry about Laura and that he would continue expressing himself as champion for the many, especially youngsters in need, and to promote social justice in America.
Within a couple of days, many public figures in the basketball and sports world in general came out supporting LeBron and Kevin for all they and other famous basketball players were doing to improve the lives of especially youngsters in need. Very notable, for example, was that NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, publicly declared that he was very proud of his players.
But the one who brought the discussion to a more profound level was Gregg Popovich, the famous coach of San Antonio Spurs, who defended the criticism of LeBron and Kevin by referring to the First Amendment of the American Constitution, which, as a human right, establishes the liberty of each citizen to express one’s opinion, inclusive on politics, irrespective one’s race, religion, sex or economic position.
By doing that, Gregg, arguably for the first time in sports history, publicly touched on The Great Political Question of where the sovereignty, the seat of the maximum political power in a nation, rests. The answer to that: with the people of each nation, which people’s sovereignty, the same as with the human rights, are recognized in the constitutions of almost all the countries in the world, although they, in reality, too often, are not being respected by the governments and politicians the way that should be.
One great importance of the right of expression of opinion by each individual person as a pillar of the people’s sovereignty is that it also includes the capacity of each person’s self-activity to, with one’s personal talents, develop one’s life to the maximum and also contribute to the progress of one’s country.
Laura, of course, in her next program, reacted to the criticism on her in which she brought two conservators of colour, whose rebuttals disappointedly remained personal (LeBron’s does not represent the values of the black community) and calling LeBron’s and Kevin’s ideas Marxists and socialists without further motivation. And while Laura called herself a political pundit, she did not touch on the Great Political Question.
Consequently, LeBron and Kevin clearly ended winning the debate, although a few points should be taken away from them for the use of certain words they would not have spoken in the presence of their mothers.
It should be applauded that sports persons like LeBron James, Kevin Durant and others, once they have reached a position of great celebrity and material fortune, use that not only to their own personal benefit, but also to that of those less fortunate. Therewith they give very clear example not only to sports persons and others in privileged positions, but particularly also to politicians around the world (thus also by us in the Caribbean) to do more to help their citizens use their capacity of self-activity for major progress of themselves and their community.

Elco Rosario

LONDON - Amnesty International has published its 2018 annual report, covering the human rights situation in the world during 2017, including a number of Caribbean nations.

Dominican Republic 2017/2018
Limited progress was made in solving the statelessness crisis. Abortion remained criminalized in all circumstances. Excessive use of force by the police and gender-based violence continued.

Background
The Dominican Republic suffered from a series of natural disasters that hit the Caribbean during the year, including two major hurricanes in September. This, along with previous flooding earlier in the year, left tens of thousands of people temporarily displaced and badly damaged infrastructure. Like many small, developing island states, the Dominican Republic remained very vulnerable to climate change, which scientists linked to the increasingly extreme weather. On 21 September, the Dominican Republic ratified the UN Paris Agreement on climate change.
Allegations that several Dominican officials were bribed by the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht triggered massive country-wide demonstrations against corruption under the Green March movement. In September, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) held a public hearing on the issue of “human rights and reports of impunity and corruption in the Dominican Republic”.
In May, the UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children visited the country. She urged the government to put child protection at the core of any tourism strategy.

Discrimination – stateless persons
The Dominican Republic continued to fail to uphold its international human rights obligations with respect to the large number of stateless people born in the country who were retroactively and arbitrarily deprived of their Dominican nationality in September 2013.
Law 169-14, adopted in May 2014 to address the statelessness crisis, continued to be poorly implemented. According to official statistics, only 13,500 people of the so-called “Group A” created by the law (out of an official estimate of 61,000 individuals) were able to access some sort of Dominican identity document proving their Dominican nationality. In the meantime, many had their original birth certificates nullified and their new ones transferred to a separate civil registry without the necessary measures in place to avoid further discrimination.
The naturalization plan established by Law 169-14 for people in “Group B” (those whose birth was never registered in the Dominican Civil Registry) had made little or no progress during the year. Of the 8,755 individuals who were able to register under the new plan (16 per cent of the estimated 53,000 people in Group B, according to the government), it was believed that as few as 6,545 had had their files approved by the authorities by the end of the year.
The law required a two-year waiting period after the approval of the registration for them to be able to formally request their naturalization as Dominicans. By the end of the year no one was known to have been naturalized under the new plan. Most of the individuals affected remained stateless in the absence of another nationality.
During the year, the authorities failed to discuss, design or implement new solutions to guarantee the right to nationality for the tens of thousands of Dominican-born people who could not benefit from Law 169-14, in particular the remaining 84% of those in Group B, and all those who were left out of the scope of the 2014 legislation.
Responding to this situation, in April the IACHR incorporated the Dominican Republic in Chapter IV.B of its annual report that included countries in need of special human rights attention.
By the end of the year, no public official had been held accountable for discriminatory practices in granting registration and identity documents, including for the 2013 mass arbitrary deprivation of nationality. Affected people continued to be denied a range of human rights and were prevented from accessing higher education, formal employment or adequate health care, among other things.

Police and security forces
The Office of the Prosecutor General reported 110 killings by security forces between January and October. The circumstances around many of the killings suggested that they may have been unlawful. The homicide rate remained high, at nearly 16 per 100,000 inhabitants during the first half of the year.
The media reported allegations of the repeated use of unnecessary and excessive force by the police during social protests.

Refugees’ and migrants’ rights
The authorities remained unable to process most of the cases of irregular migrants that they received during the National Regularization Plan for Foreigners with Irregular Migration Status that operated between 2014 and 2015. As a result, in July the authorities renewed for a further year the temporary “regularization carnets” issued to registered individuals, allowing them to stay in the country.

Sexual and reproductive rights
The Dominican Republic remained one of the few countries worldwide that criminalized abortion without exception.
In May the Senate voted against a proposal, supported by President Medina, to decriminalize abortion. On 11 July the Senate’s vote was rejected by the Chamber of Deputies, providing the possibility of future reforms that would protect the rights of women and girls.
In August, a petition was presented to the IACHR seeking justice and reparation for the death in 2012 of 16-year-old Rosaura Almonte Hernández, publicly known as “Esperancita”. Because of the country’s restrictive legislation on abortion, Rosaura Almonte Hernández, who was seven weeks pregnant, was denied life-saving treatment for leukaemia for several days and died shortly after.
An investigation published in August by the NGO Women’s Link Worldwide found that one woman died every two days in the Dominican Republic during the first half of 2017 from pregnancy-related causes due to the lack of access to quality maternal health services.

Violence against women and girls
According to official statistics, the first half of the year saw a 21 per cent increase in the number of killings of women and girls, compared with the same period in 2016.

Rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people
The Dominican Republic continued to lack legislation to combat hate crimes. In June, the body of a transgender woman, Rubi Mori, was found dismembered in wasteland. By the end of the year, no one had been brought to justice for her killing.

Dear Editor,
It saddens my heart to see the condition of the dogs of the Sheriff department. The person that is taking care of these dogs does not know at all what they are doing. The dogs are underfed, they are not given the right food to eat, they have parasites, look at the way those dogs look, they are taken advantage of.
Those dogs are guard dogs as they say, and these dogs are being paid for to do a job so they should be fed properly and be treated right. Cooked rice cannot sustain the dogs, it makes them sick, they need water just like we do and need vitamins, dewormed and good source of protein in food to be fed 2x on a daily basis. Am asking the Animal Foundation to please look into this situation. Example: take a look at the police dogs in the USA and see the difference.

Annette Hodge

Hon. Cornelius, knowing that you are one of the best Labour Ministers in St Maarten in the past and knowing that you and all the rest of the politicians know well there's an urgent need for a Small Claim Court for St Maarten people as soon as possible.