Where the Commonwealth is not foreign
This Thursday (27 November 2025), St Vincent and the Grenadines will host general elections. The Prime Minister and his party are aiming for a sixth straight term in power, and as part of this campaign, they’re alleging that Godwin Friday, the Leader of the Opposition, shouldn’t be allowed to serve in parliament because he’s a citizen of Canada as well as St Vincent, and our constitution bars people who acknowledge allegiance to a foreign power from being MPs.
There’s a lot to be said about this, but, I’ll only talk about one aspect of it. The government is almost certainly wrong about this, and Friday is eligible to serve in parliament. That’s not because he’s been an MP since 2001 despite having had a Canadian passport for years (maybe even before 2001; I don’t know). And it’s not because him having a passport doesn’t amount to him acknowledging allegiance to Canada. (Court judgements are clear on that, especially if the person naturalised as a citizen.) It’s because, under our constitution, Canada isn’t a foreign power.
It seems odd today, but under the constitution of St Vincent, there are broadly two, mutually exclusive groups of countries: Commonwealth countries and foreign countries. The right to vote in elections in St Vincent and the right to become a representative in St Vincent are not granted to Vincies, but to Commonwealth nationals meeting certain criteria. The term “foreign” isn’t directly defined in the constitution, but it’s clear from reading it, reading other laws from the time (the ~1979), and reading other Commonwealth Caribbean constitutions and their laws from the time that “foreign” meant “non-Commonwealth”. The closest our constitution comes to defining it is in its definition of “alien”, which is “a person who is not a Commonwealth citizen, a British protected person or a citizen of the Republic of Ireland”. And so we have a somewhat strange situation in which, as a Jamaican court observed of Jamaicans seeking to become MPs, regarding a similar provision in the Jamaican constitution,
If they choose a distant autocratic, unfriendly Commonwealth country for citizenship status, they can still serve in the House of Representatives. If, however, they choose to acquire such status in the United States of America, their friendly and accommodating neighbour to the north, they are disqualified. That may seem an oddity. … However, that is the constitution.
It gets even stranger for St Vincent (and maybe some other islands too). On the plain reading of our constitution, it’s arguable that St Vincent cannot declare war on another Commonwealth country (though without an army we’re very unlikely to do that anyway), and it’s clear that if St Vincent was to leave the Commonwealth, Vincentians would lose the ability to vote in their own elections or become their own MPs. Of course, whatever can be said of our judges – and, unlike many of my compatriots, I’d mostly say good things, though I think Eastern Caribbean judges have recently been wrong on related issues here – they would, correctly, not allow such absurd outcomes.
But more interesting than that is how bizarre these things are all to us, while they were presumably normal enough – or sufficiently within the bounds of aspiration – for the British and Caribbean drafters of our constitutions to include similar provisions in (virtually?) all of them. And that was only 46 years ago for St Vincent.
But as bizarre as it is, it’s a world that still lives on in a few places in the UK. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, for eg, I think is not just called the Foreign and Development Office because of the same distinction made in our constitution. I voted in the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, a few months after coming to the UK in September 2010 as a student, because as a legally resident Commonwealth national I had the right to vote in all British elections. I and many of my friends also voted in the Brexit referendum as Commonwealth nationals, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Commonwealth vote tipped the result in favour of leave. (I voted remain, but I know non-British Commonwealth nationals who voted leave, and I myself considered it effectively for pro-Commonwealth, anti-EU reasons.) And one of my cousins migrated to the UK from St Vincent after being directly recruited from there by the British army.
I’m sure there other examples. I think a lot of the other Commonwealth Countries have mostly shed these relics, but it seems that we in the British Commonwealth Caribbean and in the UK itself are still keeping some of them around.
- Legal battles set to erupt in St Vincent over Opposition leader's nomination
- Dual citizenship & Parliament -- what the drafters really intended – iWitness News
- Jacob-Owens, T 2025, 'Foreign allegiance and constitutional citizenship: Postcolonial (dis)continuities in the Commonwealth Caribbean', Comparative Constitutional Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 58-80. https://doi.org/10.4337/ccs.2024.0024
- Constitution of SVG
Fun fact: this is also available on the UK parliament’s website (but not as a proper text document) because our constitution, like all other Commonwealth Caribbean constitutions, was passed as an act of the UK parliament. - One in 10 soldiers in the British Army is a foreign national
