⟡ Addendum: On the Passport That Threatened the State ⟡
Filed: 23 October 2020
Reference: SWANK/TCI/PASSPORT-77538
Download PDF: 2020-10-23_Core_PC-77538_TCI_FChambers_PassportTravelEvidence_ConstitutionalViolation.pdf
Summary: A legal exchange in which the Turks and Caicos Government attempted to confiscate a woman’s passport — apparently mistaking family travel records for sedition.
I. What Happened
On 23 October 2020, the Department of Social Development decided that a family passport represented a national security risk.
The mother, Polly Chromatic, submitted evidence showing that her last international travel occurred in 2016 — a perfectly unremarkable fact that became, in the government’s hands, an existential crisis.
F. Chambers responded with commendable diplomacy, declaring the proposed seizure:
“An overreach and a likely violation of your constitutionally enshrined rights and freedoms.”
One suspects this sentence was typed through clenched teeth.
II. What the Document Establishes
• That the Turks and Caicos bureaucracy operates on the presumption that ownership of a passport is a crime.
• That constitutional literacy among public officials is treated as optional, like sunscreen or ethics.
• That the state’s obsession with control extends naturally to its citizens’ right to breathe, move, or possess stationery.
• That no one in the Department appears to know the difference between child protection and immigration control.
III. Why SWANK Logged It
Because a passport seizure request is the administrative equivalent of a tantrum.
Because nothing illustrates the pathology of petty authority quite like its fear of documentation.
Because this episode reveals the colonial hangover in its purest form: bureaucrats still behaving as if motherhood requires state permission to exist.
SWANK archived it as a monument to farce — a single paragraph of legal sanity surrounded by governmental hysteria.
IV. Applicable Standards & Violations
• Constitution of the Turks and Caicos Islands (2011) — rights to liberty and movement, ceremonially ignored.
• Human Rights Act 1998, Art. 8 — privacy, breached by obsession.
• Vienna Convention on Human Rights — violated, footnoted, and forgotten.
• Common Sense — long deceased.
V. SWANK’s Position
This is not “child protection.”
This is bureaucratic paranoia wearing a lanyard.
We do not accept the seizure of identification as a substitute for evidence.
We reject the weaponisation of process against personal liberty.
We will continue to document the colonial theatre of overreach until due process reacquires its passport.
⟡ This Entry Has Been Formally Archived by SWANK London Ltd. ⟡
Every stamp is an indictment. Every passport, a paper mirror reflecting state insecurity. Every archive, a customs declaration for dignity.
Because evidence deserves elegance.
And retaliation deserves an archive.