On 3 October 1899, the Arbitration Tribunal handed down its decision and immediately thereafter Mr. Severo Mallet-Prevost and General Harrison, the lawyers for Venezuela, made a statement to the Reuters correspondent, claiming ‘victory’ for the Venezuelans and that the British had lost every inch of land in its ‘extreme’ claim. According to them, the line drawn by the tribunal was one based on diplomatic compromise instead of legal principles and Venezuela had gained much but should have gained much more (Child, Clifton (1950) The Venezuela-British Guiana Boundary Arbitration of 1899. The American Journal of International Law, LX1V,4). It should, however, be remembered that the Venezuelan government was not disturbed when President Cleveland ordered his Boundary Commission to find a line based upon ‘convenience and expediency’ and not ‘right’.
On 10 January 1905, the formal agreement with regard to the mapping of the boundary was signed in Georgetown and on the completion of the process, the story should have ended and for all practical purposes it did for the next 60 years, until August 1962, when Venezuela declared at the United Nations that she was no longer prepared to accept the decision of the Tribunal of 1899 (1967 – Informe Que Los Exportos Venezolanos Para la Question De Limites Con Guyana Britanica Presentan Al Gobierno Nacional. Caracas: Ministry of External Relations).
The reason given for this dramatic step was that, found within the papers of Mallet-Prevost, was a memorandum in which he accused Russia, through its Russian chairman, Frederic de Martens, and Britain, of making a ‘deal’ that deprived Venezuela of ‘very extensive and important territory’ to which Great Britain had no right (Schoenrich, Otto (1949) The Venezuela – British Guiana Border Dispute. The American Journal of International Law, 43).
Mallet-Prevost left the paper to be published after his death and absurd as it may appear, the entire modern Guyana/Venezuela controversy rests primarily on this document, which contains a story that the writer persistently promulgated but refused to have published until he and all those who were closely associated with the arbitration were dead!
Mallet-Prevost was a prominent US lawyer with a lengthy association with the border dispute. He was the secretary to the American congressional commission established by President Cleveland in 1895 to unilaterally delimit the border in the face of British reluctance to take the entire question to arbitration. He was junior counsel on the Venezuelan side at the arbitration of 1899.
That he was born in Spanish America, the son of the governor of the Mexican state of Zacatecas, might help to account for what some viewed as his excessive bias towards Venezuela (For a more comprehensive discussion of these matters see: Joseph, Cedric l (2008) Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Reopening of the Guyana-Venezuela Boundary Controversy 1961-1966. Trafford, International). What is also highly significant is that Mallet-Prevost accepted Venezuela’s highest national award, the Order of the Liberator, one month before he penned his story of a deal.
Although he accepted that Venezuela had gained substantially from the 1899 award, from the very inception, Mallet-Prevost, like the Venezuelans, was not satisfied with the decision of the tribunal and he began to spread his tale of a ‘deal’ to all who would listen. Yet his story was inconsistent in many ways.
He said that in January 1899, when he and Justice Brewer stopped over in London on their way to the tribunal meeting in Paris, he met Lord Chief Justice Russell and in the course of the conversation he ventured to express his opinion that international arbitration should be based on legality. He said that Lord Russell disagreed and said that in his opinion international arbitration should take into consideration questions of international policy. As Mallet-Prevost commented, ‘From that moment I knew that we could not count upon Lord Russell to decide the boundary question on the basis of strict rights.’ (Schoenrich, 1949)
But when Mallet-Prevost met with Lord Russell, the latter was in no way connected with the arbitration. As indicated in last week’s column, in January 1899 Lord Herschell and Justice Collins were the British members of the arbitration panel and Lord Russell was only appointed an arbitrator on 16th March, 1899 after the sudden death of Lord Herschell (London Times 17.3.1899).
Secondly, Mallet-Prevost succumbed to the very line of argument he claimed to be irrelevant. According to him, the reason he agreed to the ‘deal’ was General Harrison’s observation, ‘Mallet-Prevost, if it should ever be known that we had it in our power to save for Venezuela the mouth of the Orinoco and failed to do so we should never be forgiven’. (Schoenrich, op. cit ) What was this if not consideration of international policy?
Mallet-Prevost also claimed that at first Lord Justice Collins’s attitude gave the impression that he was leaning toward the side of the Venezuelans. He came to this conclusion because, according to him, Justice Collins asked numerous questions that were critical of the British case. But according to Mallet-Prevost, after two weeks holiday in England, the judge asked very few questions and his whole attitude was different (Ibid.) The records show that, taking his remarks as a whole, Lord Justice Collins gave no indication that he was leaning towards the Venezuelans’ side and that after the holiday, as indeed before, he asked as many questions as Chief Justice Fuller and Justice Brewer (Child, op.cit).
Mallet-Prevost gives the impression that the Venezuelan case was overwhelming, and this may be understandable since he was partly responsible for putting that case forward and was biased towards the Venezuelans. But Sir George U. Buchanan, Britain’s Minister at the Hague and British agent at the tribunal, reported to his home office that the tribunal had not, in his opinion, been very profoundly impressed by Mallet-Prevost’s performance.
Buchanan wrote, ‘The speech which Mr. MP. thus brought to a close has not, I believe, made any real impression on the Tribunal. It has attacked the British position too much in detail, any success which he may have obtained has been of a purely negative character’ (Ibid). Of General Harrison’s statement, Buchanan reported that notwithstanding its force and eloquence, the contention that Venezuela as successor to Spain had prior title to the territory in dispute failed to impress the tribunal. (Ibid.)
Of all the 15 volumes of paper in the British Foreign Office, and all the documents found in St. Petersburg, there is not a single indication of a ‘deal’. Even the movements of the arbitrators do not indicate how a ‘deal’ could have been made (Ibid.). What appeared uppermost in M. de Martens’ mind as the tribunal came to a close was the philosophical and practical place of arbitration in international conflict.
Having noted that in cases where a majority verdict was given there were always dissenting opinions that could provide the basis for conflict, he sought a unanimous decision. So far as de Martens was concerned, the boundary line laid down by the judges was based on justice and law. He did, however, agree that the judges had been actuated by a desire to establish a compromise (not a “deal”) in a very complicated question, the origins of which must be looked for at the end of the fifteenth century (Ibid.).
Indeed, if the perpetration of any other ‘deal’ was uppermost in de Marten’s mind, he need not have involved the two American judges. All he needed to do was to vote with the two British judges for a decision in Britain’s favour.
Judge Schoenrich, who published Mallet-Prevost’s document, claimed that the award of the tribunal had created ‘general surprise and disappointment’ and that ‘students of the Venezuelan side of the controversy were shocked at the excessive grant of territory’ to Britain (Schoenrich, op. cit).
But from Caracas the British minister reported that the news had been received with ‘indifference by the public’. He had not seen a newspaper article on the subject and ‘Venezuelans of education … regretted extremely that the Barima has been awarded to them as now they can never hope for the wealth and prosperity of the region of the Orinoco which would have resulted from that river being opened to our (British) commercial influence (Child, op.cit).
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