Last Friday’s Stabroek News editorial captioned “The AG and the Judiciary” referred to High Court decision in the case involving the enforcement of an arbitral award by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) against the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA. The decision was handed down by Justice Gino Persaud who stated that he was satisfied on a balance of probabilities that the applicants, Phillips Petroleum Company Venezuela Limited and ConocoPhillips Petrozuata BV, were entitled at common law to have the arbitral award recognized and enforced in Guyana. Similar decisions were handed down in the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, Jamaica and Trinidad which, like Guyana, are common law jurisdictions.
Justice Persaud, however, took issue with the statement by the Attorney General that if the Court were to recognise the award it would be ‘wholly offensive and expose the Court in the minds of the Guyanese people to allegations of unpatriotic and anti-nationalist conduct’. The Judge stated that such an argument was more suited to an elections campaign rather than a sound legal argument for the Court. He expressed disagreement with the Attorney General’s “public policy” argument as being misconceived and stated the latter’s statement represented ‘veiled threat to the independence of the judiciary designed to intimidate the court’. As such, the statement should have been withdrawn. Justice Persaud further stated that the Attorney General is not the legal guardian of the minds of the Guyanese people. He added that: ‘[n]o practitioner (whether a novitiate recently admitted to the Bar or the Leader of the Bar) should ever accuse a sitting judge of unpatriotic and anti-nationalist conduct moreover to reduce it into writing’.