Dear Editor,

Prof Brendan Bain has been fired by UWI on the grounds that he “has lost the confidence and support of a significant sector of the community, which the CHART programme is expected to reach”.

To our knowledge, Prof Bain has been the pioneer of this programme and has served UWI and the Caribbean community for over two decades. He has travelled extensively throughout the Caribbean on behalf of the development of this programme and for the benefit of the communities served by the CHART programme which he has led since 2003. He has published widely in peer-reviewed and non-peer reviewed journals on the issue of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Chairman’s Award for Distinguished Service to the National AIDS Committee of Jamaica, and in 2008 he was elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh.

The fact that, in 2012, he gave a professional opinion in a court of law in Belize appears to have been used as the basis of an evidently orchestrated campaign against him by a group of people now referred to as “a significant sector of the community, which the CHART programme is expected to reach”.

We have known Prof Bain as a man of utmost integrity, a careful scientist, with measured views. He has served a variety of public constituencies well, and in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the Caribbean community in the field of public bealth, as a professor of medicine, the Caribbean Graduate School of Theology made him a Distinguished Fellow of the school in 2009.

We, therefore, stand by Prof Bain 100 per cent and pray that this evident miscarriage of justice will be redressed by UWI in the interest of natural justice, the pursuit of truth, and the resistance to tyranny and oppression in all its forms, and from anywhere, which UWI has inculcated in the peoples of the Caribbean since its inception in 1948. We are concerned that the outcomes of this case will affect the delivery of education in all our institutions of learning.

Las G Newman, PhD

President

Caribbean Graduate School of Theology

Kingston 8

cgstpresident@yahoo.com