While Guyana ultimately wants a juridical settlement of the decades-old border controversy with Vene-zuela, Georgetown also believes that a legal opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the Arbitral Tribunal Award of 1899 would be beneficial.
“The thing about an opinion in those circumstances is that it is only advisory. (However), the value of it to Guyana is the world will see that legal exercise, having being conducted on Venezuela’s claim, (the claim) is not supported,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Carl Greenidge said yesterday. He was at the time briefing reporters on the border controversy with Venezuela as government awaits proposals from the United Nations (UN) on a resolution to the matter.
Guyana is insisting that the controversy be settled juridically, while Venezuela wants the Good Offi-cer process to continue. President David Granger and other government spokesmen have noted that the Good Officer process had run its course without yielding results.
Earlier this month, UN Secretary General (SG) Ban Ki-moon sent a follow-up investigative team to Georgetown and Caracas after which they will report to him and he will make a decision as to whether he will grant Guyana’s petition to take the matter to the court, located in The Hague, the Netherlands.
Greenidge explained that while consensus was needed for the UN SG to send the matter to the ICJ for a juridical settlement, it was not needed if the SG requested a legal opinion.
“If, for example, as we are suggesting the SG puts to the court- ‘give us an opinion on this matter’ – the court could do so without the agreement of Venezuela. If it is, however, that you are asking them to deal with a matter of substance…as I understand, Venezuela’s concurrence will be required,” the Foreign Affairs Minister explained.
He informed that the UN fact finding delegation met with teams from Guyana on September 27th and October 12 and are given periodic updates. Greenidge affirmed that only a juridical decision can put Venezuela’s “baseless assertions” to a stop and said that the UN SG has said that a decision made by him, will have to answer Venezuela’s question.
“Venezuela has been arguing that the 1899 award is null and void, an award which is legal or quasi-legal, to be deemed null and void, requires a judicial decision…I believe that our discussions with the SG at the UN and also in passing, he acknowledged that any solution to this problem would have to involve answering the question ‘Is this award null and void?’ otherwise there is no place to go and the problem will never be resolved,” Greenidge stated.
“Venezuela has never indicated an interest in withdrawing this assertion…unless that contention is withdrawn all things the UN might do are not going to help one iota and that has been the case over the last 50 years,” he declared.
Greenidge also made reference to former President Bharat Jagdeo’s statements last week on the controversy when Jagdeo said that his PPP/C government had explored the option of granting Venezuela a channel through Guyana’s Atlantic waters. Jagdeo said that the view was explored as a means of settling the long-running border controversy, which escalated in May this year.
The Foreign Affairs Minister said that Jagdeo should have explained to the public why the proposal on the maritime initiative, which had been spoken about in diplomatic circles for a number of years, never got off the ground. He said that it was because Venezuela was never satisfied.
“Whatever the Government of Guyana or the past governments of Guyana have reflected on as it regards concessions to the Venezuelans, one thing is clear and comes out of the comments Mr Jagdeo made…at the end of that exercise they never offered any such concession to Venezuela and the question is ‘Why? Why?’ The answer is very simple…if you have an agreement signed in good faith with a partner and the partner choose…after 63 years of accepting the agreement to overturn it, do you have any guarantee that any such agreement with that partner will be honoured in the future?” he questioned.
“Guyana has lived with this dispute for 50 odd years not because it can’t be resolved (but) because one party has no intention of facilitating a resolution unless they get what they want, and whether or not they are able to argue a case for it, (it) seems we are destined to relive 1899 and 1966 many times over unless the matter is resolved by a judicial decision,” Greenidge emphasised.
He said that Jagdeo “may well be right” that other governments looked at giving Venezuela concessions but what he did not say was that the implication of that was, having considered it, those governments analyzed Venezuela’s past behaviour and know that they cannot be trusted to keep their promises.
“They will accept it as they accepted the mouth of the Orinoco and then come back to you for more,” he posited. The minister also pointed out that Venezuela had promised after the seizure of the Anadarko vessel in 2014, that diplomatic teams from both countries would meet in four months to discuss demarcation of maritime boundaries but to date, this was never done as they never sent a team.
Jagdeo had also questioned if the UN will still be involved if the decision was made to send the matter to the ICJ. Greenidge’s response to the former president was “The court is a definitive legal body in its own right, it pronounces on what it’s asked and that should be the end of the process as regards the SG and the court but the decision itself may require action afterwards by the two sides or by one side.”
Greenidge said that Guyana would continue to use every forum to highlight the issue and lobby for support. Government also plans to also seek unified support for a juridical settlement from its Com-monwealth sister countries when the heads of those countries meet in Malta on the 27-29th of November 2015.
