The Bill of Rights at Sixty-Two: Assessing Trinidad and Tobago’s Constitutional Experiment

Abstract

This keynote address was delivered by Professor Tracy Robinson at the Law Association of Trinidad and Tobago’s InauguralLaw Conference at the Hyatt Regency Hotel Port of Spain on Thursday 10th October 2024.

Trinidad and Tobago’s Bill of Rights in its Independence Constitution 1962 was the third Bill of Rights introduced in an Anglo-Caribbean Constitution. The Bill of Rights in the British Guiana Constitution 1961 was the first, followed by the Bill of Rights in Chapter III of the Jamaica Independence Constitution 1962, which came into effect a few weeks before Trinidad and Tobago’s in August 1962. The 1962 Bill of Rights was largely retained in the 1976 Trinidad and Tobago Republican Constitution. With substantial constitutional reforms to Bills of Rights in Guyana in 1980 and 2003, and in Jamaica in 2011, Trinidad and Tobago’s largely intact 1962 Bill of Rights, found in the extant 1976 Constitution, is the oldest in the Anglo-Caribbean. The Trinidad and Tobago 1962 Bill of Rights was a form of bricolage or improvisation.