A meeting will not end the impasse

Oct 28, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – It is not as simple as Lenox Shuman thinks. The appointment of a substantive Chancellor and Chief Justice of the judiciary is not simply a question of the President meeting with the Leader of the Opposition.
Nor is such a meeting as simple as Shuman would like to believe. He is wrong when he suggests that the fact that Harmon has accepted the post of Leader of the Opposition means that he accepts Irfaan Ali as President.
The APNU+AFC to which the Leader of the Opposition belongs insists that President Ali was fraudulently elected and he has not indicated whether he accepts Ali as the de facto or de jure President. And until he does so, little progress can be made in attempting to convince Ali that the Leader of the Opposition should be entertained for formal consultations.
But even if the President meets with the Leader of the Opposition, the issue of the appointment of a substantive Chancellor and Chief Justice remains outstanding.
Guyana has not had a substantive Chancellor for decades. And this is because the Opposition and the Government cannot agree on choices. They could not agree on Carl Singh and they could not agree on the judge whom Granger wanted to appoint and who worked in the Bahamas.
A former President of the Caribbean Court of Justice, Sir Dennis Byron, had weighed in on the issue. He had suggested that the failure to make substantive appointments to the top two posts in the judiciary had, “…moved well beyond what ought to be acceptable in a modern democracy, where respect for the rule of law is maintained. The constitution envisages the Judiciary of Guyana to be headed by officials who are substantively appointed and enjoy all the legal and institutional mechanisms to secure their tenure. Anything otherwise is, to my mind, a violation of the spirit and intent of the constitution.”
The PNC/R’s position has been consistent, regardless of who was the Leader of the Party. Every PNC/R leader, up to the time had refused to approve of Carl Singh as Chancellor. Ian Chang suffered the same fate as Chief Justice. His nomination was never approved by the Opposition and so he could not be appointed. Both Singh and Chang ended their illustrious legal careers as acting Chancellor and acting Chief Justice respectively.
The last time then President Granger met with then Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo, they failed to reach agreement on the appointment of a Chancellor and Chief Justice. Granger’s choice had been the former Chief Justice of Belize, Kenneth Benjamin, and Yonette Cummings as Chief Justice.
Even after calls were made for Justice Yonette Cummings and Justice Roxanne George to be confirmed as Chancellor and Chief Justice respectively, Granger stuck with Kenneth Benjamin as his choice for the top post. Both the Guyana Bar Association and the Guyana’s Women Association had called for the confirmation of both Cummings and George.
When questioned as to why he was not keen on nominating both Cummings and George for the two tops posts, Granger was quoted as saying “I cannot go outside the constitution…All of my actions have been in accordance with the constitution”.
But there is no constitutional impediment to Granger nominating Cummings as Chancellor and George as Chief Justice. It would have been problematic for Jagdeo to have resisted such nominations had they been made.
As expected, the meeting between Granger and Jagdeo, at which the former nominated Kenneth Benjamin as Chancellor, did not lead to an agreement. The Constitution requires agreement by the two leaders as a condition for making substantive appointments to the posts of Chancellor and Chief Justice.
It is not likely now that the PNC/R is going change its mind. And it is not likely also that the PPP/C will also change its mind. What therefore exists is political gridlock and it would appear that a new mechanism, other than the present one which requires consensus on these appointments, will eventually have to be enacted to break this gridlock and to avoid future gridlock.
The positions of Chief Justice and Chancellor have effectively become the victim of political differences between the APNU+AFC and the PPP/C. And no end is in sight.
The two parties are in no mood to find agreement. Their political tug-of-war is likely to continue well into the distant future.
A meeting between the Leader of the Opposition and the President is not likely to resolve this issue. Some new suggestions will have to be made to break the gridlock. Lenox Shuman’s suggestion therefore for the President and the Leader of the Opposition to meet is not likely to yield any resolution.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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