elected as the next head of state of Barbados, a symbolic position held by Queen Elizabeth II since the 1950s. Last month, the former jurist became the first president-elect of the island-nation, after securing the necessary two-thirds majority vote in both Houses of Parliament. She is set to be sworn in on Tuesday (30 Nov), making Barbados a republic on its 55th anniversary of its independence from Britain.
“We believe that the time has come for us to claim our full destiny,” Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of the Caribbean nation said in a speech after the vote. “It is a woman of the soil to whom this honour is being given,” she added.
Dame Sandra Prunella Mason was born in St. Philip, Barbados in 1949. She received her education in Queen’s College and attended the University of the West Indies and went on to become the first woman from the Caribbean island to graduate from the Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad and Tobago.
She served on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child for a period of eight years until 1999. Meanwhile, in 1992, she became the first woman magistrate from Barbados to serve as an Ambassador to Venezuela. In 1997, she became the Registrar of the Supreme Court, following which she was appointed to the Inner Bar of Barbados as Queen’s Counsel in 2005. Three years later she became the first woman to serve on the Barbados Court of Appeals, as she was sworn in as an Appeals Judge in 2008.
Subsequently, in January 2014, she went on to become the first Barbadian to be appointed as a member of the Commonwealth Secretariat Arbitral Tribunal (CSAT), headquartered in London. In December 2017, Her Majesty the Queen announced the approval of the appointment of The Honourable Sandra Prunella Mason as the eight Governor-General of Barbados, with effect from January 2018.
Political experts are of the view that Mason’s judicial experience has enabled her to do the needful as Barbados transitions to a republic, while her election is also notable owing to the fact that both the head of state and the prime minister will soon be Barbadian women.
