A referendum may best answer if M.Ps can have dual citizenship

Feb 03, 2019 Letters

Dear Editor,

A referendum may be the best course to answer if MPs can have dual citizenship.
The requirement of a dual citizen Guyanese MP to resign is good law, which is mainly due to his or her foreign power allegiance.
I feel, however, that a referendum question ought to be posed to the voter on the 2019 elections ballot, as it would serve to ensure that specifically only persons with one citizenship, Guyana, can serve at “de gov’t yaad”, which seems to me to be what the spirit of our Constitution is.
Recently, in Australia when their 10 MPs were disqualified due to their dual citizenship status conflicting with the constitutional law, a gigantic domino effect occurred whereby the Australian elections officials had to conduct a string of by-elections after July 2017 to fill those 10 seats. In the Guyana scenario, by-elections are not necessary, since names could simply be extracted from the Party’s List as replacements, as what obtained in the case of Charandass Persaud replacement by Barbara Pilgrim. The Guyanese Chief Justice (Ag) ruling on 31 January 2019, during the infamous case brought by the Honourable A.G. Basil Williams, MP, is in sync with Sykes v Cleary (1992), an Australian case.
In that case, an Australian candidate who had been declared elected in a by-election was deemed ineligible under Section 44(iv) of the Constitution, the High Court ruled that he hadn’t attempted to renounce under the law of his home country and therefore was still subject of a foreign power.
Later, in 1999, in Sue v Hill, the Australian High Court found that a British citizen who had been declared elected to the Senate in 1998 was disqualified. The UK had been a “foreign power” in 1986 since the Australia Act 1986. If this could be persuasive authority of any substance in Guyana, the judiciary has, in effect, ruled that any current Minister of Government, sitting in Parliament, who holds British citizenship, is to be deemed a subject of a foreign power, and as such must vacate his seat, and is to be disqualified to serve therein, unless of course, a renunciation, in writing, is proffered by that Minister immediately, and I may add, Guyanese should expect that for such a renunciation to be valid and subsisting, it must be acknowledged by the other state, i.e., the foreign power in question, and dated within 6 months.
GECOM should be advising prospective candidates in our upcoming elections, who hold a foreign nationality, that they will be disqualified from election to Parliament if they do not take all reasonable steps to renounce their other citizenship before nomination REPEAT before nomination.

Our country is a small and growing one and we need to manage our resources in good fashion and above all, we need trust worthy citizens to be our sitting legislators.

Yours truly,
M. Shabeer Zafar
Barrister & Solicitor

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