7 News Belize

Did Hulse Try and Fix Porous Vital Stats?
posted (November 1, 2017)
The Senate Committee also asked him for his take on how fraudulent birth certificates negatively affect the Immigration Department.

Viewers will remember that as far back as 2013, he was the first public official, who acknowledged that bogus birth certificates from the Vital Statistics Unit could dupe the entire Immigration system.

So, the Senators asked him if he had made any efforts to address that glaring weakness as the Minister in charge:

Godwin Hulse - Minister of Immigration
"I have had discussions over the years with various persons at vital statistics. I've had discussions with different persons at the CEO levels over the years to try to look at some ways to strengthen it. In some countries, it is done at the hospital as you are walking through the door. The problem I was told in Belize is that a lot of midwives deliver babies and you know, as well as I do, that it goes a little beyond that. In the past, many children were born in villages. By the time the person got to the registry to register that person the name was wrong, the birthdate was wrong, we encountered a lot of that and people had to be doing deed polls, etc. So, I think it does require a comprehensive look and some very focused attention to try to come up with a system that would satisfy the requirements of registration to ensure that the person indeed was born here. There, of course, is another issue, which is even if the person is born here in Belize, the status of the parents when the person was born here. We all know that this whole immigration issue is a major issue in the United States, in fact, it brought, I think, a president to office. It's no less major here. At this point in time, and maybe this is the point in time, to really take a detailed look at vital statistics and this whole registration process and whether in fact, we can develop some mechanism that the baby was born on the soil or was born of the blood. While we have focused on registration and that sort of thing, to my mind, that nationality by birth and descent needs some strengthening."

Mark Lizarraga - Senator for the Business Sector
"We've seen these weaknesses in our system for so long and we've done nothing and you are telling me today that you don't know of anything that we are doing to strengthen it, minister."

Godwin Hulse
"But senator, I will suggest that it's the collective effort of all of us. This matter; and nothing is dealt with until it really looms in the forefront of a society, nothing is dealt with. I think all you senators will agree that a wrong is not dealt with until it surfaces as a wrong and out of that a right comes- some law or something to correct that. So this has surfaced but nobody has really, in any report, documented or really highlighted it. I don't think it still is really highlighted only in the discourse. And so the time has come, as we evolve in this society to begin to address some of these things."

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