The right to life and the right to protect

May 18, 2014 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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The shooting to death of persons – usually poor, single, young males – by members of the Guyana Police Force seems to be occurring with increasing frequency again.  Citizens are boldly expressing disquiet both out of sympathy for the victims and out of their respect for human life.
The right to life is the most elemental of all fundamental rights enshrined in Constitution of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana. Every person in Guyana has a right to life and both the state and society have an interest in the life of every citizen. Whenever the life of anyone is taken unnaturally, it becomes a public duty and a matter of public interest to determine the circumstances and causes of death.
The Government of Guyana, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Guyana Police Force need to understand this. They must begin to implement new law-enforcement policies based on the international doctrine of the state’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ – widely known as ‘R2P.’ This doctrine has become an important part of international relations. It defines both the state’s responsibilities towards its citizens and the international community’s responsibility, in the event that the state fails to fulfill its responsibilities to protect its own population.
The doctrine of the state’s ‘Responsibility to Protect’ proposes that, although the state has an obligation to protect its physical property, it has a higher responsibility to protect human beings from torture and extrajudicial killing, especially by its security forces.
The Police Force seems not to be capable of curbing the reckless conduct of its officers who are prone to violence. The Police, responding to a previous statement by A Partnership for National Unity, admitted that, between 1st January 1997 and 18th October 2012 its officers had killed 255 persons. This is an outrage!
The United States Department of State – in its Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 2013 – stated that the Police Complaints Authority reported 14 unlawful killings by the Police for 2012. The pattern persists. There continue to be numerous confirmed reports of police killings.
The most egregious episodes of slaughter last year were two police ‘massacres.’ The police shot dead Tony Ogle, Leon Gittens and Quincy Alexander in February and Mark Anthony Joseph, Jermaine Canterbury and Mario Gouveia in October 2013. The shooting to death of young males by the police raises questions about the use of minimum force in everyday law enforcement. On some occasions, there has been no evidence that the lives of the policemen were in danger. The question might well be asked, therefore, whether the police should, or do, ‘shoot to kill.’ If it becomes necessary to shoot a suspect, should not the police aim at disabling them rather than destroying their young lives?
The Guyana Human Rights Association recently criticised the Police Force over its failure to charge officers involved in shootings. The GHRA, in one particular case, described the Force’s failure to bring charges against the officers involved in the illegal detention, torture and shooting in the mouth of a fifteen-year-old boy as “a major set-back for those hoping that the new leadership of the Guyana Police Force intends to pursue more robust action against errant police officers than their predecessors. The message this failure sends to the public is that protecting the criminals in their midst is a higher priority than protection of the public.”
Especially in cases where the police outnumber criminals, or are armed with more lethal weapons, the aim must be to arrest the culprits and bring them to trial. The police should rethink their ‘shoot-to-kill’ doctrine which often results in the deaths of persons who can be rendered harmless by non-fatal shots to the body.
Inquests into police killings seem not to have been conducted as required by the law. The Chief Magistrate has statutory responsibility for overseeing the holding of inquests. The Coroners Act provides adequately for ensuring that every unnatural death should be the subject of a public investigation. Every magistrate is a coroner. Everyone who becomes aware of an unnatural death is required to notify it to the coroner or the nearest police station.
Any member of the Police Force who becomes aware of an unnatural death is obliged to report it to the coroner. A coroner to whom such a death has been reported is obliged to investigate the cause of death and, if necessary, to hold an inquest or inquiry. A coroner who neglects or refuses to hold an inquest or inquiry can be fined, although there is no known case in which any coroner has been punished for such delinquency.
Holding an inquest or inquiry depends on the conscientiousness of the district magistrate and not on the Police Force’s investigations or the Police Complaints Authority’s recommendations. Coroners’ inquests can do much to restore public confidence in the Police Force and to allay public disquiet over the all-too-frequent cases of police killings.
Every Police killing is a breach of a citizen’s fundamental right to life. A Partnership for National Unity therefore calls for an independent judicial inquiry into all reports of police killings over the past eight years in order to determine the causes of this egregious misbehaviour by members of the Guyana Police Force.

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