Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Senator Maxine McClean
BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Thursday August 6, 2015 – Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Senator Maxine McClean says the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons pose a grave threat to Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean.
Speaking during the Open Debate on Peace and Security Challenges Facing Small Island Developing States (SIDS) as the UN Security Council met in New York recently, she said: “On a day-to-day basis, we must focus on the trade in small arms and light weapons which facilitates traffic in illicit drugs and other organized crime, and which undermines our economy and can destabilize society.”
McClean said the situation was made worse by the many vulnerabilities which commonly characterized SIDS, such as narrow resource bases, small domestic markets, susceptibility to external shocks and environmental vulnerability.
“These threats are made more significant because of the geography of SIDS. Often of small land mass, their air and maritime borders are multiple times larger. The cost to protect national borders is thus rendered prohibitive and difficult,” she said.
Taken together, the Foreign Minister said, these threats to peace and security required the diversion of already limited resources at a significant cost to national development.
“They have a grave impact on the socio-economic development of Barbados and other CARICOM states, extracting a high toll in human lives and productivity, lowering quality of life, impeding social development and undermining economic growth,” McClean.
She pointed out to the Security Council that CARICOM Heads of Government had reiterated the threat and committed to implementing all necessary actions at the national and regional level to combat the illicit trade, in the 2011 CARICOM Declaration on Small Arms and Light Weapons.
In 2013, she said, the Heads adopted the CARICOM Crime and Security Strategy, which listed a number of “immediate, significant threats” such as transnational organized crime, gang crime, cyber-crime, financial crime and corruption.
Meantime, McClean welcomed the decision of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to re-establish a presence in the Caribbean, and said she expected, as a global leader in crime prevention, that its contribution would assist “in the burdensome task we must prosecute. We look forward to the early commencement of its work in Barbados”.