The Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement has built Jamaica’s most significant coastal rights campaign around a deceptively simple legal theory: if Jamaicans used a beach openly and continuously for more than twelve years, the 1882 Prescription Act creates a public right that survives any private sale or resort development. Testing that theory in court is now JaBBEM’s core strategy.
The final quarter of 2019 brought Jamaica’s best-ever tourism numbers, the commercial enclosure of Little Dunn’s River, and a coastal access movement that was moving from protest to litigation. Q4 2019 was the season the beach rights argument became impossible for policymakers to ignore.
