ST. KITTS AND NEVIS EMBRACES EFFORTS TO ABOLISH SYSTEMATIC RACISM

Basseterre, St. Kitts, May 30, 2023 (SKNIS): Her Excellency Ambassador Nerys Dockery, St. Kitts and Nevis’ Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN) said that the Federation continues to embrace the efforts to abolish systematic racism.

Ambassador Dockery made these remarks while addressing the Second Session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent (PFPAD) on Tuesday, May 30, 2023, at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. The event runs from May 30 to June 02, 2023. It is held under the theme: ‘Realizing the dream: A United Nations Declaration on the promotion, protection and full respect of the human rights of people of African descent.’

“The abolition of systemic racism requires a systemic response, and St. Kitts and Nevis is proud to align itself with the CARICOM statement and to stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters across the Caribbean Community in making the call for Reparatory Justice and increasing our advocacy within the United Nations system to identify pragmatic steps towards its achievement,” said Ambassador Dockery.

“Reparatory justice for injury, loss and damage caused by centuries of chattel slavery, native genocide and deceptive indentureship, is the defining cause of our time to which we must dare to be worthy, especially as the International Decade for Persons of African Descent winds down.  St. Kitts and Nevis, therefore, fully supports the extension of the International Decade for People of African Descent for another decade. Change has been slow in coming, but change will come,” she added.

She noted that St. Kitts and Nevis “stands solidly behind CARICOM’s 10-Point Action Plan” for Reparatory Justice.

“It demands that the descendants of those perpetrators who benefited from slavery and the diabolical trans-Atlantic trade in Africans must return to the scene of the crime, for there is a case to be answered,” the Ambassador noted. “It also demands that the humanity of the persons of African descent who continue to experience the deleterious effects of that sordid system must also be acknowledged and affirmed, first by way of apology and then through the implementation of a radical social, political, health, education and economic justice programme.”

In the context of the Second Session of the PFPAD, Ambassador Dockery challenged all participants to dare something worthy, adding that “it was the rationale upon which the United Nations was built.”

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