The U.S. report on the local judiciary

May 02, 2019 Editorial

The word is out there. And now, since it is from the mouth of foreigners, Guyanese deniers and obfuscators will find the honesty to take a stand and admit to truth and reality. Both are unpalatable and bring much shuddering, as to the state of the local judiciary and the law enforcement machinery.
The US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 2018 report on the local judiciary is telling. In Section e. Denial of a Fair Trial: “The law provides for an independent judiciary, and the government generally respected judicial independence and impartiality.” Good for government.
Now for the damning part, “Delays and inefficiencies undermine judicial due process.” That is universally known. Lawyers impractically and irresponsibly spread themselves thin across too many cases; display an absence in basic standards before the bar; and generally string along both clients and the process, as well as the patience of magistrates and judges overwhelmed with backlogs. Simply put, there is too much discretion through too many postponements allowed to too many legal practitioners. Public and process suffer.
The litany of woes is lengthy: “Shortages of trained court personnel, postponements at the request of the defense and prosecution, occasional allegations of bribery, poor tracking of cases, and police slowness in preparing cases for trial caused delays.”
Ready acknowledgement of personnel shortage is granted; the situation is, however, exacerbated by a known shortage of people of principle (principle) who man desks, paper flow, and the travails of those trapped in a labyrinthine system. It is ripe for exploitation; and as the system goes, so also are those compelled to come to grips with Dante’s wisdom and conclusion of, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
Again, it is usually the poor that are tortured and denied by the shenanigans that proliferate in the realm of the law. It is not majestic; merely mammon-oriented. As to “poor tracking of cases”, this much can and should be said, anytime there is a paper process in Guyana, there is trouble. For those who either have access to, or control the recording and housing and retrieving of that paper, there is opportunity to exploit process and people for consideration. Things happen; or they don’t.
The generally sympathetic and supportive US report continues in the Civil Judicial Procedures and Remedies section: “Delays, inefficiencies, and alleged corruption in the magistrates’ court system affected citizens’ ability to seek timely remedies in civil matters and there was a large backlog of civil cases.”
The public is familiar with that record as reported fairly frequently in the local press. Those who have business pending – traffic, domestic cases, misdemeanour cases, and the rest – obtain firsthand experiences of the operations of a murky world that quickly assumes clear, solid lines. That might be the only thing clear about things – those lines as to how things are.
Many are the experiences from local lips of a system long practised in the art of the fix. Matters have gotten so granular and layered that there are willing helpers inside and outside of the perimeters to smooth issues over for the seekers of truth and justice (or the thwarting of both). They go by the same name as those now temporarily removed from the bus parks: touts. They tout their connections on the inside, and which could go high. Unlike the guarded US report, there is nothing “alleged” about the corrupt practices that permeate the judiciary.
Beneficiaries boast of timely results delivered. The understanding is that there is a sliding scale of established rates for different documents, different players, and different offences. In contrast to the State Department’s almost muted language of “occasional allegations of bribery”, Guyanese know that the reality rises way beyond the “occasional.” The hard reality is that the tiers of the judiciary are saturated with troubling breaches of law, procedures, and character.

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