Country-wide policy
The consolidated law of Belize is dated 31 December 2020
Every Chapter of the Substantive Laws of Belize that you can download today is the Revised Edition 2020, and each one says on its face that it shows the law as at 31 December 2020. Amendments made since are published separately, as numbered Acts and statutory instruments, and they are not worked into the Chapter. The consequence is practical and it bites hardest on the two subjects people read about most: the Chapter on the retirement programme still prints an age of forty-five that an Act of 2023 reduced to forty, and the Chapter on CARICOM skilled persons still lists thirteen qualifying states when an Act of 2026 removed three of them. Reading the Chapter and stopping there produces a confidently wrong answer. The Chapter plus every amending Act since 2021 is the law.
Topics it changes
- Visiting as a tourist
- Residency as a retiree
- Residency through work
- Residency through investment
- Residency as a student
- Residency through marriage
- Residency through ancestry
- Residency under a regional treaty
- Becoming a citizen
- When you become a tax resident
- Access to healthcare
- Driving and licence exchange
- Bringing your belongings
What it requires
- Read the Chapter in the Revised Edition 2020 for the consolidated text
- Then check the Acts of 2021 to date and the statutory instruments of 2021 to date for anything amending that Chapter
- Cite the section of the resulting Chapter, naming the Act or statutory instrument that put it there
At a glance
- Date the Revised Edition shows
- 31ST DECEMBER, 2020
Printed on the title page of every Chapter. The running head renders it as "AS AT ST 31 DECEMBER, 2020".
- Prepared by
- The Law Revision Commissioner, under the Law Revision Act, Chapter 3
Chapter 3 is a reference to the Law Revision Act, not a quantity.
- Amendments since
- Published as separate Acts and statutory instruments, not worked into the Chapter
- Chapters where this matters most
- Chapter 62 (retirement), Chapter 17:02 (CARICOM skilled persons), Chapter 161 (nationality)
Chapter numbers, not quantities.
Why a Chapter is not the whole answer
Belize publishes its law the way common-law jurisdictions do: an Act is passed, numbered and gazetted, and a revised edition gathers Acts into Chapters periodically. The last revision was 2020. Everything since sits in a separate list of Acts by year and statutory instruments by year, each of which says which Chapter it amends and which section it replaces, but none of which is folded into the Chapter you download. The amending instrument has its own section numbering, and it means something different: section 2 of the Retired Persons (Incentives) (Amendment) Act 2023 is an instruction to replace a definition, not a section of the retirement law. The section that matters is the one in Chapter 62 that results.
Subsidiary legislation is published apart as well
Each Chapter has a second volume - the Subsidiary Laws for that Chapter, also as at 31 December 2020 - holding the regulations, orders and rules made under it. That is where the Immigration (Permits and Fees) (Revised) Regulations live, where the retirement programme's application procedure and fee schedules live, and where dozens of visa exemption and visa relaxation instruments live. A reader who has found the Act and not the subsidiary volume has usually found the power and missed the rule: Chapter 52, the Exchange Control Regulations Act, is six sections of enabling power and contains nothing at all about bank accounts.
What the law says
«This is a revised edition of the Substantive Laws, prepared by the Law Revision Commissioner under the authority of the Law Revision Act, Chapter 3 of the Substantive Laws of Belize, Revised Edition 2020.»The same note appears on every Chapter. The extra space after "the" is the publisher's.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Belize's law portal, carrying the Substantive Laws in their revised edition, the Subsidiary Laws volume for each Chapter, and Acts and Statutory Instruments by year.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: A Chapter alone must never be cited for what the law is now. Every Chapter is a revised edition frozen at 31 December 2020 and nothing on the page says so: the retirement Chapter still prints an age that an Act of 2023 lowered, and the free-movement Chapter still lists states an Act of 2026 removed. The law is the Chapter plus every amending Act since. It also publishes nothing about commencement, and many Acts carry no commencement section, so a gazette date is not an entry-into-force date. A batch posting date is not a gazette date either. Its listing is served by a POST endpoint and the filenames carry hash prefixes, so a URL cannot be guessed from a chapter number.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«This edition contains a consolidation of amendments made to the law by Acts No. 1
of 2014, No. 13 of 2016, No. 46 of 2017, No. 10 of 2018, No. 18 of 2020 and No. 28
of 2020.»The list stops in 2020. The Immigration (Amendment) Act 2023, Act No. 11 of 2023, and the Caribbean Community (Free Movement and Contingent Rights) Act 2026 both amend this Chapter and neither appears in it. The same page prints the list twice with slightly different punctuation.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Belize's law portal, carrying the Substantive Laws in their revised edition, the Subsidiary Laws volume for each Chapter, and Acts and Statutory Instruments by year.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: A Chapter alone must never be cited for what the law is now. Every Chapter is a revised edition frozen at 31 December 2020 and nothing on the page says so: the retirement Chapter still prints an age that an Act of 2023 lowered, and the free-movement Chapter still lists states an Act of 2026 removed. The law is the Chapter plus every amending Act since. It also publishes nothing about commencement, and many Acts carry no commencement section, so a gazette date is not an entry-into-force date. A batch posting date is not a gazette date either. Its listing is served by a POST endpoint and the filenames carry hash prefixes, so a URL cannot be guessed from a chapter number.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«This edition contains a consolidation of amendments made to the law by Act No. 3 of 2019.»Act No. 13 of 2023 rewrote the age, the income test and the whole restriction regime of this Chapter, and does not appear here.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
Belize's law portal, carrying the Substantive Laws in their revised edition, the Subsidiary Laws volume for each Chapter, and Acts and Statutory Instruments by year.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: A Chapter alone must never be cited for what the law is now. Every Chapter is a revised edition frozen at 31 December 2020 and nothing on the page says so: the retirement Chapter still prints an age that an Act of 2023 lowered, and the free-movement Chapter still lists states an Act of 2026 removed. The law is the Chapter plus every amending Act since. It also publishes nothing about commencement, and many Acts carry no commencement section, so a gazette date is not an entry-into-force date. A batch posting date is not a gazette date either. Its listing is served by a POST endpoint and the filenames carry hash prefixes, so a URL cannot be guessed from a chapter number.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
«SHOWING THE SUBSTANTIVE LAWS AS AT 31ST DECEMBER, 2020»About this source
Belize's law portal, carrying the Substantive Laws in their revised edition, the Subsidiary Laws volume for each Chapter, and Acts and Statutory Instruments by year.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: A Chapter alone must never be cited for what the law is now. Every Chapter is a revised edition frozen at 31 December 2020 and nothing on the page says so: the retirement Chapter still prints an age that an Act of 2023 lowered, and the free-movement Chapter still lists states an Act of 2026 removed. The law is the Chapter plus every amending Act since. It also publishes nothing about commencement, and many Acts carry no commencement section, so a gazette date is not an entry-into-force date. A batch posting date is not a gazette date either. Its listing is served by a POST endpoint and the filenames carry hash prefixes, so a URL cannot be guessed from a chapter number.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
Practical notes
The Attorney General's Ministry publishes Indices, Substantive Laws (R.E. 2020), Acts by year, Subsidiary Laws (R.E. 2020) and Statutory Instruments by year as five separate collections. Checking a proposition properly means looking in at least three of them.
Permanent residence is a worked example of why the Chapter titles mislead: it is not in the Immigration Act at all, but in Part IVA of the Belizean Nationality Act, Chapter 161.
Some readings of these PDFs come back with marginal notes and running headers interleaved into the body of a section, and at least one statutory instrument extracted with unrelated text in place of a page. Quotations in this country's records are taken only from passages that read continuously.