What CARICOM is and how it works

The word, and the place it was signed

Carib came into English in the 1550s from the Spanish caribe, which the dictionaries trace to a word of the Lesser Antilles the people used of themselves. The adjective followed about two centuries later, by which time the word had already named a sea. Chaguaramas, where the treaty was signed, is a peninsula at the western end of Trinidad, and the Community has carried the name of the place ever since: the instrument that replaced the original in 2001 is the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, although it was signed at Nassau.

Who signed what, and when

Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago signed the Treaty Establishing the Caribbean Community at Chaguaramas on 4 July 1973, and it came into force on 1 August. Six more signed on 17 April 1974, and their membership runs from 1 May that year: Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent. Antigua signed on 4 July 1974 and St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla on 26 July, under a name that no longer describes a state. The Bahamas signed on 4 July 1983, Suriname acceded on 4 July 1995, and Haiti on 2 July 2002, which is the accession that put a French-speaking republic into an anglophone treaty.

The depositary's table records ratification separately from signature, and two rows carry a signature and no ratification date beside it: Montserrat and St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla.

A Caribbean community that is not all in the Caribbean

Guyana and Suriname are filed on this site under South America and Belize under Central America. Guyana also holds the Secretariat, at Turkeyen in Georgetown, so the Community's permanent staff sit on the mainland rather than on the sea the organisation is named for. Montserrat is a British Overseas Territory and the only member that is not a United Nations member state. Haiti's official languages are French and Haitian Creole and Suriname's is Dutch, which leaves English official in every member except those two.

What the treaty does not cover

The Bahamas joined the Community in 1983 without joining the Common Market, and the reservation outlived the instrument that created it. The Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas was signed at Nassau on 5 July 2001 and came into force on 1 January 2006, and the depositary's list of signatures and ratifications carries no Bahamian entry. The country takes no part in the CARICOM Single Market and Economy, and the free movement of people that comes with it does not reach the Bahamas.

Montserrat is missing from the same list for a different reason. A British Overseas Territory cannot accede to a treaty on its own authority, and needs an instrument of entrustment from the United Kingdom first. In July 2015 the Community was still recording that Montserrat had not acceded to the Revised Treaty, and therefore could not take part in the single market or the court.

The court, and who accepted it

The Agreement Establishing the Caribbean Court of Justice was signed at St Michael in Barbados on 14 February 2001 and came into force on 23 July 2002. The Court was inaugurated at Queen's Hall in Port of Spain on 16 April 2005. It carries two jurisdictions, and the same states do not hold both.

The original jurisdiction interprets the Revised Treaty and binds every state party to the agreement, which is every member except the Bahamas, Haiti and Montserrat. The appellate jurisdiction replaces the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London as the final court of appeal, and it has been accepted by Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana and Saint Lucia. Everywhere else in the Commonwealth membership the last appeal is still heard in London.

On 4 October 2013, sitting in its original jurisdiction, the Court held that a national of one member state is entitled to enter another without harassment or impediment and to stay for up to six months. The right was read out of the Revised Treaty together with a decision the Conference of Heads of Government took in 2007, and the judgment awarded damages against a member state.

Where the edges are

The organisation keeps a second tier that this page does not print. Its associate members are Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Curacao, French Guiana, Martinique and the Turks and Caicos Islands. That puts two overseas departments of France and one constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands inside the Community without putting them on the roster of members, and it returns Anguilla to the organisation in its own name, half a century after it appeared in the treaty table as part of a state that has since divided.

The catalogue files full members here and stops there. Associate membership, observer status and the free trade agreements the Community holds with states outside it are all recorded elsewhere, and none of them makes a country a member.