Petrelis Files

Jamaican Cabinet Office:
No Gay Violence Files

This was a fast turn-around. My ATI request was submitted last Tuesday, and the Jamaican Cabinet Office, one of several ministries to get my ATI, has already searched their archive and found nothing responsive to request. This letter arrived late today:

Thank you for your application for information under the Access to Information Act.

We wish to inform you that checks made by us have not revealed any documentation that "relate to or identify homicides, assaults or other violent acts committed against gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender persons, or persons perceived to be such, in Jamaica".

Since matters concerned with homicide come under the purview of the Ministry of National Security we have transferred your request to this Authority in accordance with section 13 of the Access to Information Act.

You may contact the responsible officer at email address '[address deleted]' to follow-up on your request.

When choosing which ministries to request files from, I read their sites and this description certainly made me curious to know if the Cabinet had ever internally address the gay violence in the country:

The Cabinet of the Government of Jamaica is the principal instrument of government policy. It consists of the Prime Minister, the Honourable Bruce Golding, and a minimum of thirteen other Ministers of Government, who must be members of one of the two Houses of Parliament. [...]

Since the U.S. State Department's annual human rights report consistently notes the documented anti-gay violence and murders in Jamaica, and lack of government response, and the country's abysmal record on gay human rights record has been deplored by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other NGOs, and publications such as Time magazine and the New York Times have called for the government to address the horrific hatred of gays, I thought, mistakenly, the Cabinet might have discussed the concerns of those institutions for gay Jamaicans.

On the other hand, considering the hostility from Prime Minister Golding and other forces, it would have been surprising if the Cabinet had released any documents showing any communication about gays.

Well, I may not have received the files I had hoped for, but I find small comfort knowing I at least made a few staffers in the Cabinet Office deal with gay violence, in a tiny way, in that they had to spend some time searching for records and adjudicating my request.

I've already been in touch with the ATI officer at the Ministry of National Security, and she assures me they are searching their archive. We'll see if they, and the other ministries that have received my ATI request, turn up anything, and if they release the documents to me.