Democracy at legislative and national level has suffered grave damage as a consequence of CCJ’s failure

Dear Editor,

Paragraph 5 of the Judgment of the Caribbean Court of Justice delivered on 12 July 2019 on consequential orders flowing from the passage of the No Confidence Motion passed by the National Assembly on December 21, 2018, stated:

“The judiciary interprets the Constitution. But as we intimated in our earlier judgment, these particular provisions [Article 106 (6) and 106 (7)] require no gloss on the part of the court in order to render them intelligible and workable. Their meaning is clear and it is the responsibility of the constitutional actors in Guyana to honour them. Upon the passage of a vote of no confidence, the Article requires the resignation of the Cabinet including the President. The Article goes on to state that notwithstanding such resignation, the Government shall remain in office …. “

Seeming to me to be more a pronouncement than an intimation, paragraph 56 of the judgment on the substantive issues rendered on 18 June 2019 said: “The provisions of Article 106 (6) and (7) are clear on their face. They hardly require further interpretation on the part of the courts.”

The average person reading paragraph 56 would understand as Justice Roxane George CJ in her judgment of January 31, 2019 in the case in the High Court did, “that the provision (regarding the resignation of the Cabinet) requires that the resignation of the Cabinet takes effect with immediate effect on the success of a NCM.”

Yet, having said that no further interpretation was required by the Court, the region’s eminent jurists chose to put not only an unwarranted gloss on the provision but created confusion and undermined a motion of the National Assembly by stating that “Article 106 envisages that the tenure in office of the Cabinet, including the President, after the Government’s defeat, is on a different footing from that which existed prior to the vote of no confidence.”

Except if I buy without question the old, worn and disproved adage “as wise as a judge”, it is a mystery how these five judges could perceive with such a degree of certainty what

Article 106 “envisages” without any consideration or analysis. In so doing, they felt confident enough to overturn by implication the ruling of the Chief Justice without any arguments on the matter. As an officer of the Court but also as a litigant in the matter, I cannot help but hold that the CCJ has taken a provision on which no gloss was needed, created a climate of confusion and showed the Court to be timorous and careless about the consequences of their judgment.

As wise as they are, the five judges collectively could not see the distinction between Article 106 (6) dealing with the Cabinet and Article 106 (7) dealing with the Government, not on something that the Constitution envisages but as a clear distinction which itself needs no gloss. In my view, that failure alone makes the CCJ largely responsible for the crisis now confronting our country in which the life of the Government has expired but which behaves with gay abandon and total disregard of the CCJ and its ruling.