Dear Editor,
The sacking of the three members of the Georgetown City Constabulary for getting pregnant is not only discriminatory, it is also blatantly unlawful.
We should all be grateful to the journalist, Ms Thandeka Percival, for her well-written and well-researched article in the SN of August 4 that exposed this untenable situation.
The action taken flies in the face of the rule of law. Pregnancy is one of the prohibited grounds clearly cited in the Prevention of Discrimination Act. The City Constabulary Standing Order quoted (Section 4:11 para J11) is an outrageous example of antiquated contravention in this regard. It could be taken from a page of a Dickens novel written in the 19th century. But it is, sadly, the all too frequent and brutal reality in today’s Guyana: the daily lot of women trying to seek lawful jobs and then being unlawfully denied the right to decent work through discriminatory workplace “orders.”
The Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Aganst Women (CEDAW) was one of the earliest conventions signed onto by the state of Guyana and has since been enshrined, in its entirety, in our constitution and made justiciable. A thorough search and rescue operation needs to be undertaken to ferret out and expunge any and all such contrary orders and unlawful policies that make a mockery of our constitutional guarantees against discrimination.
Our country urgently needs constitutional literacy ‒ a nation-wide educational programme on our constitutional rights and freedoms so that all citizens from parliament to primary school can know and understand the fundamentals of the highest law of the land ‒ and be better equipped to uphold and apply it everywhere.
There is no overarching National Gender Policy that exists, as yet, in Guyana. The compelling need for such an instrument is made powerfully evident by the inequality displayed in the recent appointments to state boards and now further underlined in the firing of pregnant constables. The APNU+AFC Manifesto positively promises such a gender policy as one of its 100 days priority actions, which is to be collectively reviewed through a National Women’s Conference. The sooner this is done, the better!
Yours faithfully,
Vanda Radzik
