The Poison Pill in Commonwealth Caribbean Constitutions

When the United Kingdom and its Caribbean colonies negotiated a peaceful path to independence, the new post-colonial Caribbean constitutions commonly retained the British monarch as Head of State, with day-to-day operations led by a local prime minister in the role of Head of Government. Like virtually every constitution enacted since 1789, these Caribbean independence constitutions codify a set of procedures for their own amendment. Yet there is something quite peculiar about the amendment procedures in post-colonial Caribbean constitutions: they contain a poison pill that makes it significantly more difficult to replace the British monarch with a locally chosen Head of State. In this essay, I discuss the dynamics of republican movements in the Commonwealth Caribbean, and I draw from my experience as a member of the 15-person Constitutional Reform Committee of Jamaica to show the effects of the decolonial poison pill on efforts to modernize the system of government in Jamaica from a constitutional monarchy to a parliamentary republic.