Sandra Mason

Sandra Mason became the first president of Barbados in November 2021, having been the last governor-general, and so presided over the removal of the monarchy she had represented. She was the first woman admitted to the bar in Barbados to be appointed a magistrate, the first Barbadian woman on the Eastern Caribbean Court of Appeal, and a judge for most of three decades before entering diplomacy as ambassador to Venezuela, Chile, Colombia and Brazil. She was made governor-general in 2018. In September 2020 she read the throne speech in which Mia Mottley's government announced that Barbados would become a republic by the fifty-fifth anniversary of independence, quoting the first prime minister Errol Barrow's line that the country should not loiter on colonial premises. Parliament elected her president in October 2021 and she was sworn in at midnight on 30 November in Heroes Square, with Prince Charles present and Rihanna named a national hero at the same ceremony. Barbados remained in the Commonwealth. The change was made by parliamentary vote without a referendum, which the opposition objected to and which is the standing criticism of it. She is the ceremonial head of state under a constitution that leaves executive power with the prime minister, and a constitutional review to write a new one has been running since. She had spent much of her career on the bench in a jurisdiction where the Privy Council in London was the final court of appeal, and Barbados had moved to the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2005, so the constitutional break of 2021 completed a change that had begun in the courts. She was made a Dame of St Andrew in 2018. The transition was the first republican change of head of state in the Commonwealth since Mauritius in 1992.

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