Dear Editor,
I welcome the letter by the former Attorney General, Mr. Charles Ramson, on the theme of “fairness”, which I raised in a letter published on April 18, 2021. He is quite right to put me to the test on the basis of what I possess. Ramson says he has no recollection of that exchange, which is fresh in my mind. He may not even have read my brief comment, as it was not a letter, but something like a one or two-line comment from me on an electronic medium. I should have said that I challenged, rather than ‘corrected’ the Attorney General, as he argued what he is now affirming that the Attorney General in our Constitution is within his rights to advise, but not instruct, the Director of Public Prosecutions. He cited a precedent, involving an attempt to impeach him in the National Assembly. All of this is very useful information for citizens learning to govern. I welcome his sharing of the experience, as I welcome his use of the proverb more correctly rendered as “nevva de day canoe bore punt”. This canoe or non-lawyer did not intend to bore the punt, the senior counsel, but merely to keep it from crashing into the stop-off.
Having pondered the wisdom of the senior counsel, I continue to hold the view that the Attorney General, as a politically appointed minister under the Constitution, is violating the spirit of the Constitution if he or she offers advice to the DPP. I note that Ramson says now, as he said in the incident I alleged, that he advised, and not instructed, the DPP. I have always thought that Article 187 of the Constitution was intended to insulate the DPP from political influences of all kinds. The Attorney General is, by law adviser to the Executive President, leader of the party that forms the government. To my mind, if advice is permitted from one to the other, then the Cabinet, a politically composed counsel and the official endowed with responsibility for unbiased prosecution of defendants, are exposed to the same bias which, for the safety of the citizens, must be assumed to be most likely partisan. The danger is even greater if the advice from the Attorney General to the DPP is contained in an informal note, rather than in a formal memorandum, or given in the hearing of the public. The prosecution must not only be fair and independent, but must appear to be so, and its integrity should not be open to questions, because of a possibility of informal messages from the Cabinet legal adviser to the DPP.
Like other readers, I await impatiently the publication of Ramson’s 3rd book in which he promises to reveal how Dr. Jagan’s intervention rescued some abandoned person from being unknown, “with respect to the 1961 by-election in the Houston Constituency.” The former Attorney General, Ramson, became the first Commissioner of Information, after the passing of the Freedom of Information Act in 2014. He should therefore be able to remind readers of the date of the by-election he refers to, of the candidate contesting and the outcome, or of how long the “impasse”, if any lasted after the by-election to which he referred. I must add that Ramson’s grandfather, in my boyhood in Buxton, had his own way of avoiding the fate of being forgotten and he sustained it without the aid of any political patron.
Sincerely,
Eusi Kwayana
