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The Constitution is not just a checklist of deadlines & technicalities, Mr. President!
Dear Editor,
VPAC finds it necessary to comment publicly on the increasingly deliberate pattern by which President Irfaan Ali continues to observe the letter of the Constitution while steadily undermining its spirit and intent.
His recent announcement that the 13th Parliament will be convened on Monday, November 3, 2025, epitomizes this approach. The Constitution allows a maximum of four months between the dissolution of Parliament and its reconvening. By choosing, however, to wait until the last possible day within that window, the President may claim technical compliance with the law, but in effect has delayed the reactivation of parliamentary oversight and national representation.
This approach, though lawful on its surface, runs counter to the very purpose of the constitutional requirement, which envisions the earliest possible return of the people’s representatives to active duty in the service of accountability, debate, and governance.
Even as he prepares to convene the new Parliament, the President has also initiated requests for consultation and lists of nominees for substantive judicial appointments from the outgoing Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Aubrey Norton, fully aware that within days, that office will be filled by another Member of Parliament.
While the Constitution is pellucid that such appointments require consultation with the Leader of the Opposition, consultation is not meant to be a hollow ritual or a procedural box-ticking exercise.
For more than fifteen years, the offices of Chancellor of the Judiciary and Chief Justice have been filled in an acting capacity, a condition that every Head-of-State has publicly promised to remedy.
The present situation, in which the President is suddenly moving to fill these posts substantively only days before the new Parliament and Opposition Leader are sworn in, creates the impression that constitutional appointments are being managed for political advantage rather than institutional stability.
Such conduct, again, adheres strictly to the letter of the law but offends the spirit of meaningful consultation and shared responsibility for the judiciary’s independence.
VPAC acknowledges that the President has the right to act within the framework of the Constitution, but the framers of that document never intended it to be reduced to a checklist of deadlines and technicalities. While President Ali’s government may be operating within the narrow confines of legality, it is clearly breaching the broader constitutional principle of good faith.
It is not enough to obey the law in word; one must also honour its purpose. Guyana’s Constitution must never be reduced to a technical instrument of convenience.
Dorwain Bess
Chairman VPAC
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