The meetings last week between the President and the Leader of the Opposition and the President and the Guyana Elections Commission, did not yield a solution to the impending constitutional crisis that has been dominating the news in recent weeks. Maybe the President and his Attorney General do not believe that a constitutional crisis faces Guyana on […]
Tag Archives: government
THE CONSEQENCES OF HOLDING OFFICE ILLEGALLY
The statement issued by the Bar Council of the Guyana Bar Association during last week quoted a dictum of the Chief Justice (ag) in the case of Attorney General of Guyana v Dr. Barton Scotland, Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo and Mr. Joseph Harmonas follows: “I hold that the NCM [no confidence motion] was carried as the requisite majority was obtained by a vote of […]
THE STATUS QUO NO LONGER EXISTS AND THERE CAN BE NO BUSINESS AS USUAL. A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT THE ONLY WAY OUT.
The Chief Justice ruled that the no confidence motion was lawfully passed on December 21 in the National Assembly by a 33-32 vote, and that the vote of Charandass Persaud was lawful, notwithstanding that as a dual citizen he was unlawfully occupying his seat in the National Assembly. Consequent upon those findings, the Chief Justice ruled that the […]
ARE A FEW MORE MONTHS IN OFFICE WORTH THE TROUBLE?
By virtue of the now familiar Article 106(7) of the Constitution of Guyana, elections are due to be held within three months of the passage of a no confidence motion in the National Assembly on December 21, 2018, that is, by the end of March. The court has no power to alter the Constitution by […]
EXPLOITING THE SENTIMENTS OF THE ELECTORATE
In a lengthy article written in 2011 before the general elections of that year, for “Freedom House” on “Countries at the Crossroads 2011: Guyana,” Assistant Professor Joan Mars, of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice of the University of Michigan-Flint, said: “Elections are constitutionally due to be held in 2011. Calls by the political opposition for shared governance have not been endorsed […]