– McCormack tells human rights day forum
Saying that deep-seated structural flaws plague the Guyana Police Force, Mike McCormack has urged that those long-ignored recommendations of the Disciplined Services Commission need to be addressed to foster a better human rights climate in the country.
McCormack, who is Co-President of the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), said security concerns in the country have been militarized to an unacceptable degree, and he called for a change in the “two separate justice systems” that currently prevail. McCormack was speaking on the occasion of International Human Rights Day which was observed on Thursday last.
He said two separate justice systems are allowed to operate in Guyana; one exists for common crimes committed by citizens and another for those seen as enemies of the state. “The latter are deemed to have forfeited their human rights to arrest and dignified conditions of detention. This system operates from the Office of the President which offers large bounty to the disciplined services for their capture – dead or alive – which in practice is usually the former,” he said.
McCormack said too that a two-track strategy is inevitably finding reasons for criminalizing social protest of any kind. He added that rather than focus on crime, public safety is reduced to a frontal war with anyone whose loyalty may be suspect. The GHRA co-president also decried what he described as the politicizing of the disciplined services. According to him, it has ushered in a catalogue of brutal criminality. He said it is not simply an issue of rouge individuals, adding that the disciplined forces have been involved in systematic extra-judicial killings and in torture.
He said it started on the highway at GDF camps and continued with the Lindo Creek massacre; the murderous robberies on the Essequibo River of Dwieve Kant Ramdass; Henry Gibson and Ricky Jainarine and the torture at Leonora police station. “We do welcome the fact that for the first time an investigation into allegations of torture has been published on the internet, a full report is there, and we hope it is the beginning of what would be a routine process of publishing the report. We would welcome the torture report on the GDF soldiers that were tortured at Ayanganna to be treated in a similar manner.”
McCormack said too that Guyanese had a glimpse this year of extensive and complex connections between organized crime in the country and senior government officials through the New York courts. He said the New York trials stood in stark contrast with the mysterious “inability of the criminal justice system in Guyana to convict indictably a single drug dealer in Guyana”.
Among the other issues he touched on were the poverty rate, overcrowding in the prisons and the need for swift implementation of several critical policies and legislation.
The forum also addressed the rights of differently-abled persons and included a forceful presentation from Julie Lewis. She called on legislators currently assessing a bill in the Select Committee at Parliament to carefully examine it and “treat it with urgency”. Lewis said also that persons with disabilities are told of equal opportunities but that they often question that. “It is easy to say you have access to an education, but what good is school if I can’t see anything and there is nothing in place to facilitate me,” Lewis said. She noted that when the bill is passed the necessary provisions would have to be put in place to facilitate persons who are differently-abled.
In addition, Co-President of GHRA Sharon La Rose and Lawrence Anselmo of the Amerindian People’s Association also touched on the rights of access to traditional lands in hinterland communities. Both pointed out that the rights of the country’s indigenous communities are not being respected by the administration and by some miners.
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