The authorities took an “obeah lady” to court last week. Did you know that Cayman has a Law against obeah (voodoo)?  No? You probably thought we had freedom of religion in Cayman.

The Law was inherited from Jamaica, and dates from the earliest days of plantation slavery when all African religions were feared as keeping the slaves from being assimilated into their masters’ culture.  It is strange to see Cayman in this day and age still suppressing this aspect of its proud African heritage.
I wonder why we do that.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, says in Article 18, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion… to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

That declared freedom – with some provisos – was written into the European Convention on Human Rights.

That Convention raises freedom of religion to the status of international law. Its provisions are superior in force to the domestic laws of all the nations that have signed it, and their territories.

Our Police officers seem not to know this – hence the prosecution.  Our lawyers both government and private seem not to know it either – hence all the successful prosecutions.

Our Immigration officers – and our Police officers and lawyers – seem not to know that the International Convention on Refugees is superior to our domestic regulations on the treatment of Cuban boat people.

A pregnant Cuban woman was among a boatload of refugees ordered out of Cayman waters a week ago, after being refused water, food and medicine.

Did she and her companions survive the journey to Honduras? If not, was the Caymanian officials’ meanness a factor in their deaths?  We may never know. A few days later, an empty boat washed up on Little Cayman, and nobody turned a hair. Do our officials really not give a damn whether the refugees live or die?  Do they really feel no embarrassment for betraying Cayman’s rich and honourable seafaring heritage? Presumably not.

When our churchgoers pray for those in peril on the sea, do they mean only personal friends?  Is that the way prayer works?  Is that the religion that’s supposed to be so superior to obeah?

Article 3 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) says, “Everyone has the right to life… and security of person”.

Last January this newspaper reported that four construction workers from the Dominican Republic had protested in writing against their conditions of recruitment and employment.  They told of no medical insurance and no pension fund, and multiple breaches of the Labour and Immigration Laws.  Ten per cent of their wages were taken as commission when they were lent out to other companies.  The recruiter held their passports.

Their protest got them hustled onto a plane to Cuba so quickly that there wasn’t time to enquire into their allegations. Their exploiters – and the officials who were parties to the exploitation – were safe from prosecution.

Their recruiter took a later plane to the DR to hire a new batch of suckers.

Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”  Article 6 says, “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”

Of course all the victims in these cases didn’t have to come to Cayman – except the obeah lady who I understand is a native Caymanian.  They have brought their troubles on themselves.  If they don’t like it, they should go home.  Right?  “The Golden Rule” doesn’t apply to strangers, right?

But I’m not sure that is right.  The Golden Rule my grandmother taught me when I was little can’t have been much different from the one everybody else’s grandmothers taught them. I don’t remember being told to be nice only to people of my own kind, and nasty to others.

The thing is, both human rights and the Golden Rule are supposed to apply to everybody. Even Cubans and Jamaicans, and even people belonging to weird African religions.

Somebody asked me the other day to explain “human rights” in my column, and here it is. Our obligations towards our fellow human beings are summed up in the Golden Rule.  Do as you would be done by.

Do our political rulers really have the authority to ignore human rights by repealing the Golden Rule? No of course they don’t. They may not believe in it, and they may tell their officials to ignore it; but they don’t have the power to repeal it.

The Golden Rule our grandmas taught us was something real, and not just a “paper rule”.

One day we will have a Bill of Rights written into our Constitution, to a big fanfare and trumpets. But the way things look now, it will be ignored by our rulers in the same way they ignore the decency required by the Golden Rule.

They will dismiss the Bill of Rights as a “paper rule”, and will allow their officials to discriminate as much as they like against selected classes of humans.

Whether our next elections are in two years’ time or three, we voters had better try to elect MLAs who do believe in the Golden Rule, and who will put it back on the books.