President Bharrat Jagdeo has asked the Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon to look into the non-appointment of an Ombudsman over the last two years.
Meanwhile regarding the extension of the term of office of the commissioners on the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) the President said that now that parliament has resumed he expects that the deadlock that led to the extension of the term of the commissioners could be broken and new commissioners appointed.
When asked about the status of the Office of the Ombudsman, Jagdeo told the media at press conference on Tuesday that he has asked Dr Luncheon to look at the matter and he is in the process of examining it.
Even though the Office of the Ombudsman has not been functioning over the past two years or more, the government had still been making budgetary allocations to the office. Since the last Ombudsman, Justice S.Y. Mohamed demitted office in early 2005, no one has replaced him and the staff members were reassigned to other government departments. This issue was ventilated in a recent news item in the Sunday Stabroek.
The Office of the Ombuds-man is a constitutional body to which employees of the state and government departments could seek recourse if they feel that they have suffered injustice as a consequence of a fault in the administration.
Meanwhile, Jagdeo did not explain on what grounds he controversially extended the term of the ERC commissioners but he said that he expects the impasse between the government and the opposition to be resolved in the National Assembly for the re-appointment of the commissioners. There is no mechanism laid out in the Constitution for extending the term of the commissioners.
The opposition PNCR did not support several motions put forward by the parliamentary appointive committee (Committee of Appointments) on the reconstitution of the ERC because of the “unconstitutionality” of the motions put to the house, PNCR Chairman Winston Murray had told Stabroek News.
He had emphasised that the PNCR-1G was not against the reconstitution of the commission but was against the procedure which was unconstitutional. He said that the error in the motions prepared by the appointive committee – which included PNCR-1G MPs – was pointed out to the committee on the floor. The error was not taken into consideration by the members of the PPP/C on the appointive committee nor by their members in parliament and this led to the deadlock.
Murray had explained that the original motion, brought to the National Assembly by Prime Minister Sam Hinds on May 10, 2007, sought to have it determine the entities to be consulted and from which members would be appointed to the ERC in accordance with Article 212 B (1) (a) of the constoitution.
The motion further resolved that the number of the nominees of each group of entities be one member each from the Christian, Hindu, Muslim, trade unions, private sector organizations, youth organisations, and women’s organisations.
The motion had also sought to expand the list of consulted entities for nominating members from 117 to 162. The PNCR-1G opposed the motion because the final clause in the motion’s schedule contravened the constitution. Murray said that unless there was an amendment to the constitution, the motion as it was printed was in breach of Article 212 (b) of the constitution. This was pointed out to the appointive committee but the motion was still put to the House without the necessary steps being taken to correct the motion.
Murray also contended that there was no provision in the constitution for the President’s involvement in extending the life of the commission.
Necessity
When asked whether he had any concerns about heading a constitutional body considered unconstitutional by the main opposition, ERC Chairman Bishop Juan Edghill told the Stabroek News that he did not consider the extension an illegality since no agreement had been reached in parliament and the term of office of the commissioners was extended as a matter of necessity and was based on the approval of the entities that nominated the commissioners in the first instance.
He reiterated that the commissioners were not re-appointed but the term was extended based on a PPP/C motion in Parliament calling for an intervention by the President on the matter. The decision to extend the term was only done after consultation with the entities which nominated the commissioners.
He said that the commissioners, himself included, were anxious for parliament to resolve the issue and appoint new commissioners as soon as possible.