United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-moon can choose to refer the Guyana-Venezuela border controversy for judicial settlement and Guyana must keep up the pressure for him to act, former Guyana Facilitator to the Good Officer Process, Ralph Ramkarran says.
After over two decades of the UN Good Officer process with no progress on the matter, Guyana is insisting that the controversy be settled juridically. Venezuela wants the Good Officer process to continue but President David Granger and other government spokesmen have noted that the process had run its course without yielding results.
Last week, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo questioned whether a juridical settlement is an available option. He was apparently unaware that last year, the then PPP/C administration raised the topic of a judicial settlement. At her end-of-year press briefing in December last year, then Minister of Foreign Affairs Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett had said that Guyana was considering a number of options to resolve the border controversy with Venezuela and was aiming to make a firm decision this year. Among the options being considered were judicial action and arbitration.
Rodrigues-Birkett had said that the UN Good Officer Process had yielded little during the past two decades in resolving the matter. “It’s been more than twenty years since the Good Officer’s process…If in two decades, you haven’t had the kind of progress you would like to see and you have had additions that complicate that, I think you need to look at the options,” she had said.
Additionally, in March this year, then head of the President Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon told reporters that government was considering initiating judicial proceedings to settle the border controversy. “What is really obvious is not only to Guyana, but also to the UN Secretary General and our partner, the Government of the Bolivarian Republic that we are not really getting very far with the Good (Officer) process and its facility…indeed, I follow the line that we have pretty much exhausted what could indeed come from the Good (Officer),” he was quoted as saying.
Rodrigues-Birkett, at the time, also expressed similar sentiments about the Good Officer process. “We are, therefore, looking at the other options under the Geneva Agreement,” she had told the Guyana Times.
On Friday, Jagdeo said that his PPP/C government had explored the option of granting Venezuela a channel through Guyana’s Atlantic waters as a means of settling the long-running border controversy, which escalated in May this year.
Ramkarran, in his column in the Sunday Stabroek yesterday, said it is within the absolute discretion of the UN Secretary General to choose a means of settlement. “If that method fails, the Secretary General again has an absolute discretion; he or she “shall choose” another method as stipulated in Article 33 (of the UN Charter). Among the methods stipulated is “judicial settlement.” Therefore, the Secretary General does not need the consent of either Guyana or Venezuela in determining his choice. He can choose judicial settlement by his own independent judgment, the Good Officer Process having clearly failed,” Ramkarran wrote.
Jurisdiction
He said that before the Secretary General chooses a judicial settlement, in which case he will refer the matter to the International Commission of Jurists, (ICJ also known as the World Court) he must satisfy himself that the ICJ has jurisdiction. Ramkarran, who had been Guyana’s representative in the Good Officer process, pointed out that Article 36 of the ICJ’s Statute gives it jurisdiction over “all cases which the parties refer to it and all matters specially provided for in the Charter of the United Nations or in treaties and conventions in force.”
“The Geneva Agree-ment is a treaty, certainly within the contemplation of Article 36. The provisions of the Geneva Agreement…provide for a “judicial settlement” to be chosen by the Secretary General. There can be little doubt, therefore, that notwithstanding the dozens of complex cases which deal with the jurisdiction of the ICJ, that it does indeed have jurisdiction, both countries having agreed to a judicial settlement and having given the authority to the Secretary General of the UN to decide,” Ramkarran asserted.
“The ball is now in the Secretary General’s court and Guyana must keep up the pressure for him to act,” he added.
Earlier, he had noted that Venezuela has once again attempted to intimidate a foreign investor, Guyana Goldfields Inc, as it has done in other instances before.
He said that Venezuela no doubt wishes the continuation of the same Good Officer process so that it will remain free to engage in its hostile activity towards Guyana. “The ultimate objective of its economic and escalating military intimidation is to prevent Guyana from developing its economy and military so as to eventually force us in desperation to settle the border controversy by ceding territory,” Ramkarran, also a former Speaker of the National Assembly, wrote.
He said that Jagdeo revealed that his Government had already succumbed to the temptation by considering offering Venezuela an outlet into the Atlantic. “It is not known whether Mr. Jagdeo was advised that Venezuela already has innocent passage to the Atlantic under the Law of the Sea Convention, even though it is not signatory, and doesn’t need a ‘maritime channel.’ But assuming that Venezuela had accepted Mr. Jagdeo’s foolhardy scheme, after digesting that morsel, there is no doubt that the next generation would have come for more,” Ramkarran declared.
He pointed out that the parties to the Geneva Agreement, which included then British Guiana and Venezuela, clearly intended that a time frame should exist for the settlement of the controversy. The Mixed Commission had a specific lifespan of four years. “If there was no settlement both Guyana and Venezuela agreed to choose “without delay” one of the means of peaceful settlement provided in Article 33 of the UN Charter. The submission of the report of the Mixed Commission and agreement on a method under Article 33 had both to be accomplished within three months after the expiration of the four-year period. These provisions clearly demonstrate that the signatories to the Geneva Agreement intended that time should be of the essence. It was certainly not intended that the processes under the Geneva Agreement should be open-ended and that the controversy should persist unresolved over decades,” he wrote.
