Dear Editor,
The issue of the admission of LLB graduates of the University of Guyana to the Hugh Wooding Law School has once again raised its head in the public domain. The matter has been obfuscated by a plethora of statements emanating from the Attorney- General, Mr Basil Williams, who has not only misrepresented the facts but refuses to accept any responsibility and shifts blame from himself to me, the previous administration and to the Council of Legal Education. As a result, I feel compelled to respond in order to set the record straight.
In 2013-14, I along with the then Head of the Department of Law, University of Guyana, Mr Sheldon McDonald, successfully negotiated, on behalf of the Government of Guyana, the terms of a new agreement with officials of the University of the West Indies and the Council of Legal Education of the West Indies, for the continued automatic admissions of graduates of the UG Law Programme into the Hugh Wooding Law School. This became necessary because the previous agreement entered into by my predecessor had come to an end through the effluxion of time.
For the record, this entire initiative was a PPP/C government one which was started in 1996. Two previous such agreements had expired. The responsibility became mine to negotiate and conclude the third. At the commencement of the negotiations, several members of CLE/UWI team had argued for non-renewal of the agreement. We defeated this argument. They next argued for a reduction in the quota of 25.
We again defeated this argument. In the end not only did we succeed in retaining the quota of 25 for Guyanese national graduates but were able to secure an additional 10 places for non-Guyanese nationals who were graduates of the said law programme.
This agreement was to be signed before September 2015 to regulate the admission of students for the year 2015-16 to the law school. I left office in May 2015. Upon my departure, I briefed Basil Williams. I explained to him that the hard work is finished and that all he needs to do is to ensure that the agreement which was being drafted by UG and UWI be signed and taken to the CLE for their signature, because it is a tripartite agreement. One year later, I am reading in the press that Mr Williams has disclosed that this agreement has not yet been signed. What is worse, rather than remain silent or accept his responsibility to get it signed, he blames the previous government and the Council of Legal Education for this predicament. To further befuddle this simple issue, he throws a red herring into the equation about building a local school.
Even if that’s a feasible option, it will take years to materialize. What will happen to students in the meantime? Why after one year, has the negotiated agreement not been signed?
Mr Williams blames a decision of the former People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) administration to discontinue contributions to the Hugh Wooding Law School (HWLS) as the reason for the dilemma facing Guyanese law students:
“I could tell you that they all [HWLS] feel that because we don’t pay and contribute, it is unfair for us to have our students taking up places at the school… It is a question of the discontinuance of paying any contribution whatsoever, and we inherited that situation and are trying to address it…” Mr Williams was quoted as saying in the Guyana Times of June 8.
These statements constitute another demonstration of the shocking lack of understanding of, or the gross misunderstanding by the Attorney- General of matters for which he holds responsibility. It is clear that he does not understand the nature and purpose of the contributions to which he refers.
Had he done so, he ought to appreciate that it has no causal connection whatsoever to the admission of our UG LLB graduates to the Hugh Wooding Law School.
Historically, each member territory of the Council of Legal Education of the West Indies made an annual financial contribution to the Council, depending upon the number of seats allocated to each territory, for their students to be admitted to the regional law schools. In this regard, Guyana’s quota has always been 25. The financial contribution which each territory makes is in turn used to subsidize the tuition fees which these students are required to pay at the law school. Guyana stopped this contribution nearly 15 years ago. It never affected the admission of our students into the law school for all these years.
All that it meant was that the Guyanese students no longer benefited from subsidized tuition fees and therefore, have been paying the full tuition fee since.
In fact, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago are the only two countries in the Caribbean that are not indebted to the Council of Legal Education in relation to this contribution. Millions of US dollars are owed by the other territories.
This is reflected in the Annual Financial Statements of the Council of Legal Education, a copy of which is sent to every Attorney-General of the region, who are all ex-officio executive members of the Council. It is obvious that Mr Williams never read his.
Ironically, during all of the negotiations which I have had with the Council for the admission of UG Law graduates, my most potent argument has been that apart from Trinidad and Tobago, the largest influx of revenue into the Hugh Wooding Law School comes from the Guyanese students who pay their full tuition fees, and it is this revenue that carries the bulk of the other students whose governments fail to pay the subsidies for their students. Therefore, I used Guyana’s non- contribution as an asset.
It is my sincere hope that the grandstanding ceases and that this government finds a speedy solution to this matter which will inure to the best interest of the students.
Yours faithfully,
Mohabir Anil Nandlall, MP
