Attorney General Basil Williams SC and an opposition team met yesterday to discuss the criteria for nominations to fill the vacancy of Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission (Gecom) but no progress was made.
It was President David Granger who recommended the meeting several weeks ago, after he had indicated that the list of nominees provided by Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo was unacceptable.
At the meeting yesterday Williams represented government while former AG Anil Nandlall and attorney Priya Manickchand represented the opposition.
In a statement released late yesterday afternoon, Nandlall said that while they presented their interpretation of Article 161 of the Constitution, Williams was “unprepared” and said he needed time to prepare a response. Several attempts by this newspaper to contact Williams for a comment on Nandlall’s statement were futile. Williams was the one who set the date and time for yesterday’s meeting and up to press time last evening, he had not issued a statement on its outcome.
Nandlall said in his statement that he and Manickchand “proffered our interpretation of Article 161 of the Constitution, in writing, and we supported our position with a number of case law authorities from Guyana, the Caribbean and the Commonwealth.”
He said that Williams did not put forward his or the government’s interpretation of Article 161 of the Constitution, despite several requests for him to do so. “Instead, he indicated that he will need time to interpret our contentions and prepare his response,” Nandlall said, adding that the interpretation offered had been fully and publicly ventilated in the media.
The meeting, he said, ended with the AG being unable to identify another date available in his diary for a second meeting.
“I am disappointed by the lack of preparedness of the Attorney General, which resulted in nothing tangible emerging from the engagement…. Quite frankly, I was hoping that the Attorney General would have been ready with his position on the matter today; that may have resulted in this matter being concluded with dispatch and decisively,” he said.
Nandlall said that with this delay the country’s democracy continues to hang in the balance.
“We consider this a matter of great national importance,” he stressed.
Jagdeo told media last week that he would await the outcome of the meeting between the two sides before deciding on the “next course of action.” He said he believed his party’s interpretation of the Constitution was shared by many others.
In keeping with his duty under the Constitution, Jagdeo had submitted a list of six nominees to Granger, who rejected it, highlighting the legal qualifications stipulated by the Constitution.
Article 161 (2) of the constitution states, “Subject to the provisions of paragraph (4), the Chairman of the Elections Commission shall be a person who holds or who has held office as a judge of a court having unlimited jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters in some part of the Commonwealth or a court having jurisdiction in appeals from any such court or who is qualified to be appointed as any such judge, or any other fit and proper person, to be appointed by the President from a list of six persons, not unacceptable to the President, submitted by the Leader of the Opposition after meaningful consultation with the non-governmental political parties represented in the National Assembly.”
Since then, there have been many arguments supporting both the president’s interpretation and that of Jagdeo, who has argued that the Constitution does not restrict candidates to judges or persons qualified to be appointed to judgeship.
The immediate past chairman, Dr Steve Surujbally, does not fit the criteria but falls under the category of “or any other fit and proper person.”
Granger himself was nominated for the post under the same proviso by then opposition leader Desmond Hoyte, but has since said that any breaches that may have occurred in the past must not be repeated.
