Dear Editor,
As night follows day, Mr Christopher Ram has replied to Mr Murseline Bacchus’s letter (‘There can be no allegations that an offence was committed by the AG that the police should investigate,’ SN, November 27). Mr Ram’s letter ‘A voyage into irrelevance’ was published in Stabroek News on December 2. Mr Ram’s uncanny obsession with the Attorney General is well known. Neither the response nor its contents should therefore be a surprise. Mr Bacchus’s letter was an intellectual explanation of the state of the law in Guyana vis-à-vis the recorded conversation. Though not its intent, the letter clearly exonerated the Attorney General from any criminal liability. But, of course Mr Ram’s fixation with the Attorney General cannot allow such a letter to go unanswered. I suspect that it must have caused him great agony and sleepless nights when he read it.
Rather than deal with the issues of law raised by Mr Bacchus as that was his only focus in that letter, Mr Ram voyaged into his own “irrelevance.” Relevance remains the cornerstone of legal arguments.
An avid illustration of his inability to deal with the legal argument presented by Mr Bacchus is his attempts to ridicule Mr Bacchus’s reference to an old English case and his recitation of how the current law of threat in Guyana evolved through its English origin. While I am not a lawyer, I know judicial decisions are a source of law and remain so unless and until overruled by another judicial decision or overtaken by statute. The fact that the cases are 184 years old or 1084 years old is completely irrelevant. First year law students must know this.
Mr Ram persists in a most non-lawyerly fashion to contend that the AG “admitted knowledge of and possible direct involvement in some serious crimes and misdemeanours”; as expected, he didn’t list any of these “serious crimes and misdemeanours.” I am sure that the readers would have expected at least one of these offences to be named and the section of the law violated, identified. Mr Ram did not do so and I am sure he cannot. I hope Mr Bacchus would offer a fuller response to Mr Ram’s rantings.
As for me, Mr Ram and others like him seem to be confusing the position of the AG, Mr Nandlall, with that of the pope. As far as I am aware ministers of government subscribe to an oath of office which reads, “I… do hereby solemnly declare that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the People of Guyana that I will faithfully execute the office of… without fear or favour, affection or ill will and that in the execution of the functions of that office I will honour, uphold and preserve the Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana.” I would like the wise men and women who are making pronouncements on this matter to show which aspect of that oath was violated by the AG.
My own view is that if you invade the sanctity of a man’s privacy, you record his conversation without his knowledge, you broadcast it publicly, thereby making every member of the public an eavesdropper to a private conversation, how can you and those who have eavesdropped complain that they are offended by what they heard. The truth is that they were not supposed to hear it and if they did, they did so wrongly, and therefore whoever claims to be offended, they have to live by it. I honestly wish the AG had said more.
Yours faithfully,
Richard Mendoza
