By Dr Bertrand Ramcharan
Barrister-at-Law
Author of ‘Modernizing the Role of the International Court of Justice’ (2022)
Over four days between 17 and 22 November, Guyana’s lawyers put up a valiant battle to secure the country’s territorial integrity in the face of arguments by an imaginative group of lawyers for Venezuela. We owe a debt of gratitude to Guyana’s legal team.
The immediate issue was Venezuela’s contention that, although the ICJ had earlier held, in 2020, that it had jurisdiction to pronounce on the validity of the 1899 arbitral award, the case should not be admitted because of the absence of the UK from the proceedings. Guyana’s lawyers argued vehemently that this was an invented issue, without legal foundation.