Yesterday’s disclosure by the police that the complainant who pressed a rape allegation against the Minister of Local Government, Nigel Dharamlall no longer wishes to proceed has naturally drawn sharp reactions and concerns.
The primary concern of the public should be with the welfare of this child. Extraordinary measures should be taken to protect her from some of the unthinking actions that have attended this matter including a senior education official being deputed to find her and offer her succour. Further, Guyana’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child have to be upheld as it relates to the complainant.
It seems most unlikely that a girl of her age would take the step of issuing the complaint in the first place, agree to go under the care of the Childcare and Protection Agency (CPA), maintain her statement during a forensic interview and have the case submitted to the Guyana Police Force (GPF) for the purpose of investigating Minister Dharamlall only to decide against pursuing it several days later.
It is perhaps easy to determine where matters took a sudden turn. After the documenting of the statement, the police prepared a file and delivered it on Thursday, June 22 to the Chambers of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). What should have been a routine examination of a statement taken under the auspices of the CPA appeared not to have been sufficient for the DPP to determine that all of the elements for a charge existed. The DPP did not act on the file until June 28 when it returned it to the police for “further investigation”. What further investigation this entailed is unknown. The DPP’s excuse of having thousands of files was shallow and not tenable for a matter of national importance that demanded urgency.
By yesterday June 30, the case had unravelled as the complainant, according to the police, no longer wanted to proceed. There is a whiff of infamy in the air. It had always been known that the government would not want to have a charge of rape of a 16-year-old brought against a sitting minister of government and it now appears to have been accorded an escape.
The CPA had been accused of preventing the complainant from having access to independent counsel. This, it unconvincingly, belatedly denied. All is definitely not right in this case and considering that there had been previous allegations of the corrupting of the case and perverting the course of justice there should be an investigation of how the CPA handled this matter. But who will conduct such an investigation? The government’s interest is to have this matter fall away and it will not convene an investigation.
Can the non-governmental organisation/s that interfaced with this child after the return of the file by the DPP to the police confirm that their conduct was to the highest standard and that this outcome reported by the police yesterday was to be expected? Can the police detail what exactly they did in this matter after the return of the file from the DPP?
The taint from this case will not be easily effaced. At this point the public needs the assurance that the rights of this child have not been trampled in the interest of the government trying to save face.
