MR RIDLEY:
Your Excellencies, Ministers and Gentlemen, I am pleased to welcome you all to this important gathering. I am happy that we have with us as distinguished guests representatives of
Commonwealth Caribbean countries and other countries represented in the Commonwealth Ministerial Committee on Belize, all of which
have passed along this same path on their own way to independent nationhood. To the work of successive generations of Ministers
and officials of both our Governments who have worked so hard
towards the objective of a secure independence for Belize, I must at the outset of these meetings pay generous tribute. Though I have the honour of chairing the Conference it is they who have laboured in the vineyard at the heat of the day.
I have had many predecessors as Minister of State, who would like to have had the honour and privilege which is mine today of opening the Constitutional Conference to prepare the way for independence for Belize. I take no pleasure, nor I am sure, do any of us, that this highly important event has been so long delayed. Nevertheless it is a great satisfaction that the work
which we began in the latest round of talks with the Guatemalans starting eighteen months ago, has prospered. It enables us to take the important step of meeting in conference to consider constitutional provisions for the new Nation of Belize, shortly to achieve its independence.
The task of this conference is to prepare the constitution for an independent Belize. Belize is the last British Dependent
Territory on the American mainland, although there are still about 16 other dependencies around the world.
For the Belizeans this is of course the second time around.
It is perhaps not particularly remarkable for a territory to have 2 Constitutional Conferences. The unique feature in this case is that the 2 occasions are 18 years apart. That previous Constitutional Conference in 1963 brought Belize to internal self- Government, a stage in constitutional development that is normally a short interval before the assumption of full independence
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