St. Vincent government awaiting US response on third-country ceportees

Prime Minister Godwin Friday says his new administration is awaiting a response from the United States after Saint Vincent and the Grenadines was asked to facilitate third-country refugees being sent to the island when Washington cannot return them to their state of birth or origin.

Speaking on state-owned NBC Radio, Friday said Kingstown had already sent a response to Washington and is now waiting for further information regarding the migration policy.

“Yes, we have been approached with respect to that and a number of other countries in the OECS, I think all of them have. We have been presented with a memorandum of understanding for us to review. We have engaged in that process with the US authorities and have responded with a draft that we seek to negotiate.

“And this is something that other countries in the region have done, and that process is continuing,” said Friday, who also serves as chairman of the eight-member Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States.

He noted that both the OECS and the wider Caribbean Community grouping were created to promote regional integration and cooperation, although he acknowledged that the bloc has faced challenges coordinating foreign policy over the years.

“… but we never stopped trying, and certainly with this issue, with respect to this initiative for the third country deportees, this is something we have discussed with our OECS colleagues, and we essentially seek to coordinate a response with respect to that.”

Friday said that while each OECS country has been approached, the initiatives are being pursued bilaterally between the United States and individual countries.

“But, as I said, CARICOM and OECS were put together for a particular purpose, and we use that in a way for us to seek to have common approaches to them,” he said, noting that the OECS has free movement of people and that any arrangement allowing individuals to enter one country could affect the others.

Friday said it therefore “makes sense for us to … take advice from one another, and to discuss these matters and to seek to coordinate our responses.

“So that is part of what we are doing. And we know that the US, in terms of their requests and so forth, they understand that that’s part of the process, and that we have to look as well for the security and ask questions about how we are going to, how would that programme would be operationalised, and some of those matters we are discussing at the moment,” Friday said, adding that the issue of third-country deportees “raises a number of concerns for us.

“We want to be helpful and be cooperative and to have good relations with all of the countries that we’ve had historically good relations with, including the United States, and where we can be of assistance, we always say that we would, and we expect reciprocity in that regard,” Friday said.