The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has again called for all clauses which dilute the constitutional right to life to be removed from the Constitution and for the systematic removal of justification for violence from specific legal statutes.
This is in the wake of two vigilante killings last week, in Sophia and Berbice of two men suspected of petty larceny. The GHRA said in a release that the cold, cruel and apparently calculated killings have rightly generated widespread revulsion.
The government through the medium of the Ministry of Home Affairs, has reminded citizens that “while it is recognised that citizens have a right to defend themselves and their property”, this must only be done “in collaboration with the lawful authority and suspects must be allowed due process,” the release said.
The association sees this as erroneous. The Constitution of Guyana in Article 138 on the right to life allows for life to be taken “(a) for the defence of any person from violence or for the defence of property, (b) to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained, (c) for the purpose of suppressing a riot and mutiny, and (d) in order to prevent the commission by that person of a criminal offence,” the release said.
According to the release, there is no reference to any of this having been done in collaboration with “lawful authority.
The ample range of circumstances in which depriving a person of life in Guyana is considered defensible may come as a surprise to many ordinary citizens, but the political authorities cannot plead such ignorance,” the GHRA stated.
Noting the many attempts to secure an unequivocal constitutional right to life, GHRA questioned whether it should be concluded that “the porous and threadbare nature of the right to life in Guyana” was an accident or omission, or whether its ambivalence is deliberate and cultivated.
It cited the case of Valerie Gordon of Sophia, a mother of nine who died from heart failure after police shot recklessly close to her home and mentioned the “literally hundreds of unlawful and extra-judicial killings – predominantly of Afro-Guyanese men – which have occurred during the past decade”.
Rather than hollow assertions about enforcing hollow laws on the perpetrators of bestial acts, the GHRA said, a more reassuring official response would be to show leadership to a society in abject moral confusion. It referred to the present administration as being “allergic to taking a principled stance on a range of violence-related issues, whether life, death penalty, corporal punishment, or corruption”.
Citizens, in general, the GHRA said, have been remarkably law-abiding in the absence of such leadership and faced with “considerable evidence of official involvement in crime, corruption and extra-judicial killings”.
The society has become thoroughly ambivalent about violence, whether be it gender-based, racially-inspired, legally-protected, provoked by mental illness, or poverty-related, the release stated, adding that this was a result of the lack of leadership on values.
It noted that while the majority of victims are predictably vulnerable and poor, no one is exempt and therefore the only credible response to the recent gruesome deaths is to send a clear message that all life in Guyana is sacred and that no form of violence will be tolerated by reform the Constitution and amending certain laws.
