According to Minister of Foreign Affairs and Immigration Fred Mitchell, the case of Matthew Sewell, an innocent Jamaican man incarcerated in The Bahamas for the better part of a decade, hinged on nothing more than an “administrative error”.

To call Mitchell’s reaction to this deplorable miscarriage of justice flippant would be a laughable understatement. He shocking lack of empathy for the suffering of others has now sunk to such embarrassing levels that Prime Minister Christie should be seriously reconsidering his fitness for a post on the international stage.

The last stage of Sewell’s harrowing ordeal, at the hands of Mitchell’s very own Immigration Department, was indeed the result of an error: even after he was declared innocent of all charges by the courts, this poor man continued to be held for another year under an article of the Immigration Act which does not even exist.

For some reason, Mitchell seems to think this shameful fact negates the grave concerns of human rights defenders over this case. In fact, it does the opposite. That a man could be held in detention for so long over a mere slip of the pen – with government lawyers fighting tooth and nail to keep him there, even after the error came to light – is indicative of the troubling level of disregard for human liberty displayed by the authorities in The Bahamas today.

Mitchell goes on to point out that the error was “easily correctible” by a phone call or through a lawyers’ conference. For his own sake, we hope the minister is not serious. Relatives of those held at the Carmichael Detention Center have routinely been ignored, impeded or turned away from the gates when trying to point out cases of wrongful detention. Attorneys seeking to protect the rights of detainees have been denied access to their clients, or else told they must get permission from senior immigration officers –a totally illegal demand.

In any case, when an individual is wrongfully deprived of his freedom, the only way to even begin to correct such a deplorable crime is for the state to make whatever redress the courts think is fit and proper, as outlined in the law.

According to Mitchell, of course, Matthew Sewell was not wrongfully detained at all, because the judge in his case did not use these precise words. As a lawyer, the minister really should know better.

Everyone in The Bahamas is by definition innocent until proven guilty. All of the charges leveled at Sewell having been dropped, he remains innocent and was therefore by definition wrongfully imprisoned on trumped up charges – some of which, Mitchell conveniently forgot to mention, were in relation to crimes that happened while Sewell was already incarcerated!

It is most disingenuous of Mitchell to claim that after being exonerated, Sewell was held by the Immigration Department for a further year because he “had no status in The Bahamas”. As the minister should well know, there is no such crime as “having no status”. There are only three violations listed in the Immigration Act: entering without permission, overstaying the allotted time and working without a permit.

Of these, overstaying is the only charge that could have even remotely been thought to apply to Sewell, although we hope no one would be so bold as to argue that a man who was detained 10 days after he arrived in the country – and who remained either incarcerated or on bail and unable to leave while the state held his travel documents for more than eight years – voluntarily remained in Bahamian territory past the three weeks originally granted him. To seek to justify the loss of another year of his life on such a ridiculous basis would surely be too low, even for Mitchell.

Finally, we would urge the minister to remember that Matthew Sewell is not a number or statistic, he is not a political football. Matthew Sewell is a flesh and blood human being whose life has been forever altered by the highhandedness and ineptitude of our law enforcement agencies. Rather than continue to seek to defend the indefensible, dragging our international reputation through the mud in the process, Mitchell and his colleagues should simply offer this man their sincerest apology and a pledge to do all they can to redress the profound injustice visited upon him.