Dear Editor,
There has been no public information about the status of the Land Court at Demerara and the Guyana Bar Association has a duty to fill this communication gap.
Around the beginning of 2014, the Commissioner of Title, Mr Rabindra Rooplall, as he then was, demitted office. We are informed that Mr Rooplall had reached the age of 55 and under the Public Service Rules which applied to him, he retired.
The erstwhile Commissioner of Title functioned effectively as a judicial officer, nonetheless and it is unfortunate that arrangements could not be made or were not made for him to continue in office until a replacement was appointed or for him to finish all pending cases. Even one case is too many. We are informed that his replacement was not identified or appointed prior to this sudden circumstance (Mr Rooplall’s 55th birthday) because the Judicial Services Commission (JSC) was not constituted.
The term of the JSC appointed under Article 198 of the Guyana Constitution is for three years. The last appointments having been made in 2010, one would have thought that the National Assembly would have conducted its consultations and made appointments with alacrity so that its work would continue with minimum disruption.
Further or alternatively, the outgoing JSC would have alerted the National Assembly to this eventuality. Perhaps they too were taken by surprise.
After some agitation on the part of the Guyana Bar Association for the National Assembly to consult us and other stakeholders, we are informed that the Appointments Committee of the National Assembly met in May 2014 and approved nominations made by the Guyana Bar Association for former Justice Lennox Perry to be appointed to the JSC. The JSC will be properly constituted when the appointees take their respective oaths.
In the meantime, the already large backlog of work in this important court will be compounded, in our view, unnecessarily. We think the public deserves better.
Yours faithfully,
Ronald Burch-Smith
