GHRA welcomes postponement of Terroriam Bill

Dec 20, 2015 News

The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has commended the decision by the Coalition Government to postpone passage of the Anti-Terrorism Bill in one Parliamentary sitting. The GHRA said that while calls for further consultation are welcome, the GHRA’s primary concern is the absence of assessment by agencies familiar with such legislation worldwide, particularly the UN.
A further troubling issue is how consultation is understood by government agencies.
“The fact that none of the GHRA recommendations was accepted in the Anti-Terrorism consultation would have been defensible if there were evidence of amendments from elsewhere having improved the original draft.
“In the absence of such evidence, an explanation of what ‘consultation’ means for the Attorney-General’s Chambers in particular would be helpful.”
The GHRA noted that the early months of the new Government saw a blizzard of consultations: civic bodies such as the GHRA were hard-pressed to do justice to the many requests for input to these processes which often involved trekking out to the Arthur Chung Convention Centre.
“In some cases these activities became building-blocks for more constructive relations between civil society and Government, reflected in superior policy-making outcomes. In others, they appear to have been little more than symbolic gestures to international funders, without strengthening relations between civic and public sector agencies.”
The length of time the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act has been shunted on and off the Parliamentary agenda in recent years offers more justification for completing all remaining stages in one session.
Nonetheless, the Coalition Government needs to dispel any suggestion that Parliament is an inconvenient process. Efforts to curtail the Parliamentary budget debate are still fresh in peoples’ memory. What comes across as short-circuiting democracy may in fact be more accurately ascribed to poor planning, in which side-lining consultation becomes the quickest route to make up for lost time.
On a more positive note, the GHRA welcomes the amendment of the term “beneficial ownership” in Section 2 (1) of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act. Transparency campaigns are being waged worldwide to legally enforce a requirement that the real names of natural persons who own or benefit from businesses be made available to the public.
“Too often, real ownership is veiled behind anonymous names, encouraging widespread financial criminality. The new definition will require all persons to be named, who through their exercise of significant ownership and control of companies are major beneficiaries.
“Equally significant in the interests of transparency, is the amendment to Section 15(4) (c) of the new Act which extends the beneficial ownership requirement to business partners when establishing a business relationship.”

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GHRA welcomes postponement of Terroriam Bill

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