Dear Editor,
It is unbelievable that one week has passed and no meeting has been scheduled for the continuation of discussions at the informal level either between the Leader of the Opposition and the President or with their emissaries.
We, in the Parliamentary Opposition, thought that we were making progress in the informal engagement, albeit slowly, with four names that are “not unacceptable” to the President. Despite the CCJ’s ruling that the appointment of the chairman in accordance with the constitution is of “utmost urgency”, and the President’s statement on July 12th that the appointment could be done in a matter of days, the Leader of the Opposition’s informal submission of an additional four names on July 18th for the President’s consideration with regards to their acceptability to him remains unanswered.
This is the “bad faith” that the Caribbean Court of Justice warned about in their June 18th ruling and July 12th consequential orders.
President Granger’s public statement must no longer believed by the public. On several occasions he has changed his mind and in others openly contradicted earlier public statements such as those he made on July 12th, and July 19th, 2019 which are a complete reversal of the statements he made at his July 4th press conference following the meeting with the Leader of the Opposition with regards to the appointment of the Chair of the Guyana Elections Commission.
On July 4th the President re-affirmed that
…” yes l could make submissions, but in the final analysis, that submission has to come to me from the Leader of the Opposition, the CCJ has not taken away that role from the Leader of the Opposition and it has not taken away my prerogative to make a selection. Those have been preserved by the CCJ”.
However, in his July 12th and 18th statements, the President has inserted himself in the role of submitting and determining names on the list of six from which he will select, a role in contravention of art 161 (2) and the CCJ ruling of June 18th 2019.
The Leader of the Opposition has on more than one occasion written to the President and declared publicly “his availability to meet at any time and daily” in order to conclude the informal process of finding six names “not unacceptable” to the President in keeping with article 161 (2).
Yours faithfully,
Gail Teixeira
