Published 8 November 2017
Buckie Got It, St. Kitts and Nevis News Source
Nevis’s Mark Brantley still to keep promise of introducing campaign finance legislation
Basseterre, St. Kitts, November 8 2017 – With Nevis Island Administration (NIA) elections a few months away, Nevis’ deputy premier, Hon. Mark Brantley is completing another five-year term without his Concerned Citizens Movement (CCM)-led Nevis Island Administration without implementing campaign finance legislation.
Brantley, a lawyer, who is also the Federation’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Aviation, expressed support for campaign finance rules in the Federation and the wider Caribbean in 2013.
Mr. Brantley, then Leader of the Opposition in the Federal Assembly, was among 42 delegates from 14 countries who attended the OAS’s regional forum on “Strengthening Regulation of Political Parties and Political Financing Systems in the Caribbean” held in Bridgetown, Barbados.
“There was consensus that campaign financing, campaign finance reform are very critical issues. The OAS has…proposed a draft model legislation which we have all brought back with us and which will clearly form the basis of discussions at the local levels,” he told WINN FM in May 2013.
“The feeling is that this is something that is timely, that this is something that is necessary, because all of us naturally are concerned about the potential for abuse and for elections and the continually escalating costs allowing perhaps unsavoury elements to influence those elections results, and so that is definitely a concern, especially in small states such as ours,” Brantley said.
The regional forum held in Barbados in 2013 followed a 2010 regional consultation on model campaign finance legislation organized by the OAS in Kingston, Jamaica, and aimed to engage high-level stakeholders in the development of laws and regulations on political financing in order to ensure transparent and equitable electoral processes in the region.
Photo: Hon. Mark Brantley
