Challenge to legality of house-to-house registration Lawyers asked to lay over submissions

May 30, 2019 News

Proceedings filed challenging the legality and constitutionality of house-to-house registration, scheduled to be conducted from next month by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), are ongoing before Chief Justice Roxane George at the High Court in Georgetown. Recently, lawyers in the case were asked to lay over submissions on certain legal issues pinpointed by Justice George.
The matter comes up for another hearing on Wednesday, June 26. Last month, private citizen and pensioner Bibi Zeenatoum, who resides at East Street, Georgetown filed court action against Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield and GECOM, which seeks to halt the holding of House-to-House Registration, which could last for months.
The pensioner is being represented by Attorneys-at-law Mohabir Anil Nandlall, Marcia Nadir-Sharma, Manoj Narayan, Sasha Mahadeo-Narayan and Rajendra Jaigobin. In a Fixed Date Application (FDA) filed by her lawyers, Zeenatoum says that she is advised that there is no law which requires GECOM to conduct House-to-House Registration for the purposes of creating a new National Register of Registrants for elections purposes.
Rather, she says, the respondents – GECOM and its CEO – are mandated by law to engage in continuous registration with a baseline of the year 2001 and must follow the criteria established by the law and their own practice. According to her, “I am advised by my Attorneys-at-law and do verily believe that there are no laws that require proof of residency in Guyana as being an element of qualification for registration to the National Register of Registrants.”
She said, “I am advised by my Attorneys-at-law and do verily believe that I am a registered elector in Guyana and during the Respondents’ proposed house-to-house registration exercise, I will be excluded and will cease to be a registered elector and will be denied the opportunity and right to vote in any upcoming elections in Guyana.”
Among other things, Zeenatoum is asking for a declaration that the proposed house-to-house registration exercise to be embarked upon by the respondents in or about June 2019, to create a new National Register of Registrants from which will be extracted a new Official List of Electors, shall be unconstitutional, ultra vires, illegal, null, void and of no effect.
She also wants a declaration that the proposed exercise will exclude existing qualified registrants currently on the National Register of Registrants and on the Official List of Electors, shall be unconstitutional, ultra vires, illegal, null, void and of no effect. Further, she is asking for a Conservatory Order restraining the respondents by themselves, their servants and their agents from embarking upon House-to-House Registration scheduled to commence in June 2019, or any date thereafter.
Nandlall, a former Attorney General under the PPP regime, had explained that the proceedings are filed to protect the constitutional rights of thousands of registered electors to vote at the next elections from all sides of the political divide.
Nandlall said, “The nation is well acquainted with the political duplicity and electoral trickery and artifice of the PNC. Quite apart from their inglorious record of rigging elections in 1996, they supported a legislation in the National Assembly to make an ID card a valid requirement to vote but when they lost the 1997 elections, they challenged those elections on the ground that the very requirement of that ID card was unconstitutional and unlawful, causing those elections to be vitiated.”

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Challenge to legality of house-to-house registration Lawyers asked to lay over submissions

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