“Dignified Lives” Need Law and Order: A Christian Lawyers’ Leader Calls for a National Land Policy

• The Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship president called for a national land policy
• She spoke after about 20 houses were demolished at Cooper’s Pen
• She urged emergency government help for displaced residents
• She warned political actors against enabling squatting

The president of the Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship has called for a non-partisan national land policy in the wake of the Cooper’s Pen demolitions in Trelawny, the Jamaica Observer reported on August 18, 2026.

Helene Coley Nicholson was speaking at a Jamaica Teachers’ Association conference, days after about 20 concrete houses at Cooper’s Pen were demolished, displacing dozens of residents. She urged the Government to provide emergency assistance to those affected, and called for a wider look at land tenure policy to deal with generational landlessness and informal settlements.

“It is time for a conversation about the responsibility of leadership to design land policy,” she said. She was equally clear that the answer could not be lawlessness. “People cannot live dignified lives without principles, law, and order,” she said.

Coley Nicholson also pointed at politics. She said leaders must consider “letting go of certain levers of partisan political control, such as aiding and abetting” squatting, warning against political actors who encourage illegal occupation for partisan advantage.

Her intervention reflects a position many Christian organisations in Jamaica have been working towards: compassion for families without land, combined with respect for titles and the rule of law. Churches are directly affected on both sides, as landowners whose own properties have been captured and as ministries serving communities that live without secure tenure. A policy that is agreed across party lines, rather than rewritten with each change of government, would give both churches and families a clearer idea of where they stand.

For Jamaicans at home and abroad, a national land policy would touch everything from how land is titled and taxed to how informal settlements are regularised or relocated. Diaspora families holding land back home, returnees planning to build, and churches deciding what to do with idle acres all have a stake in whether that conversation finally produces clear, consistent rules.

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