Those protesting lawyers are hypocrites and cowards

Nov 08, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – A lawyer was wrongfully detained by the police for advising her client in front of police officers in the station. She was detained for about ten minutes and released on the advice of the Attorney-General who apologised.

Led by the Bar Association’s hierarchy, a few dozen lawyers protested outside the Special Organsied Crime Unit (SOCU). In which country were these lawyers perambulating the parapet with placards in their hands?

Surely, it couldn’t be in Guyana where the Bar Association is an invisible hypocritical entity. Surely it cannot be in Guyana where not in recent memory lawyers came out and picket in public for any type of violation that occurred within the rule of law where such violations are more noticeable than the perennial grass on the parapet that they were stomping on.

You may see what I about to write as making fun out of a serious situation, but I am serious when I write that all those protesting should have been arrested on three charges – wanton hypocrisy, disgusting cowardice and destruction to public property by destroying the grass on which they walked.

The Bar Association and its members have an agenda, and like the agenda of the Usual Suspects, Lunatic Fringe, Creole Middle Class and Political Nouveau Lumpen, the contents and shape of their agenda will soon unfold. If you follow politics in Guyana, you must know what their agenda is all about.

If you lived in Guyana for a long time you will know that there has been a long merger between the hypocrisy and cowardice of the Bar Association that lacerates your soul to the point that you cannot take it anymore. No one called me to tell me these lawyers were picketing. Had they done that I would have engaged in a counter-picketing exercise against them.

Police violations and the absurdities in the rule of law are permanent sociological features in Guyana. But the only two societal dimensions that do not know about these two depravities are the Bar Association and those protesting lawyers.

Let us lecture those lawyers who have been protesting and mashing up the neatly architecture parapet outside SOCU. A magistrate remanded a lady named Taylor even though the prosecutor told the court that the accused was charged by a mistake. That absurdity was made public but the Bar Association was in Timbuktu at the time. I took that very magistrate to the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) for violating Ms. Taylor’s right and because of that fact, I asked the very JSC to have the magistrate recuse herself over the trial where Kwame McCoy, Jason Abdulla and Shawn Hinds were charged with an attempt on my life.

The JSC was not interested neither was the Bar Association. That trial was the most comical act performed in a court room in the history of this country. The prosecutor made no objections and the magistrate read out the lyrics of a song she told me in court when I was on the stand that I like to write about in my columns – Hotel California by the Eagles. The Bar Association didn’t know about this because it was in Timbuktu at the time.

Dr. Walter Ramsahoye sued me for libel. I counter-sued him. Both cases were heard at the same time. His in front of Justice Gregory Barnes, mine in front of Justice Cummings-Edwards. Justice Barnes ruled in favour of Ramsahoye and awarded him $2 million. After 7 years, I am still to hear the verdict in my writ. This travesty was made public but the Bar Association at the time was holidaying in Timbuktu. Police violations of citizens’ rights occur with morbid frequency in this country but those lawyers who were mashing up the grass do not know about these things and if they do, poor people have to find an impossible sum just to get them to go to the station.

Magistrates violate poor people’s rights often in the courts throughout the country, but the Bar Association is too cowardly to chastise them because their members have to appear in front of those very magistrates. Do you know the funny thing about the Bar Association picket? It was headed by the Bar Association President, Ms. Pauline Chase. She was the lawyer deputising for her father, Ashton, Chase, on one occasion when Mr. Juan Edghill asked Justice Insanally to send me to prison for contempt of court. The judge refused his request.

Ms. Chase had to be favoured by the ruling party to have become a member of the Procurement Commission. The commissioners are selected by the two major parties. Couldn’t the PPP find someone who needed the money more? A commissioner gets over a million a month.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not this newspaper.)

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