Dear Editor,
Throughout the modern world, nations recognize the commercial importance of facilitating international trade and encouraging security in international transactions and permit enforcement of international arbitration awards where parties breach their obligations under those transactions. It is in the public interest. In Guyana our Parliament has passed laws to permit enforcement of international awards in the public interest. Obedience to the law, and observance of laws passed by Parliament, is the highest public interest.
Venezuela owes money under a valid international arbitration award, and its creditor has applied to the courts in Guyana under our laws to enforce payment of that debt by garnishing sums owed by a Guyana state entity to Venezuela. Confronted with clear law, our Attorney-General has resorted to invent his own version of public policy – that it can somehow be in the public interest to ignore the law, to defy Parliament, and to refuse relief to an applicant which has shown a clear legal right.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Lord Truro in the English House of Lords stated: “…the expression of ‘public policy’… has been confounded with what may be called political policy… with which it has nothing whatever to do.”
It may be politically expedient for the Government to decline to pay its debt, but it is unlawful, and an unlawful act cannot be countenanced by the Court. The Attorney-General’s opinion does not reflect public policy, either as a general principle, or in this specific case. Burnham relied on ‘public policy’ to justify breaking the law when he nationalized private ventures fifty years ago. APNU loyalists justified breaking the law through electoral fraud in 2020 as necessary to keep the PPP out of office ‘for the public good’.
There is a ring of prophesy in the words of Justice Burrough given in judgment in 1824, two hundred years ago, rejecting a similarly implausible public policy argument made by counsel: “public policy… is a very unruly horse, and when once you get astride it you never know where it will carry you. It may lead you from the sound law. It is never argued at all but when other points fail.”
Yours faithfully,
Timothy Jonas
