No connection between my free travel and supposed presidential pardon
Dear Editor,
Please refer to the letter written by the former Attorney General, Mr Anil Nandlall, ‘Presidential pardon enabled Donald Rodney to travel to Guyana and testify before the Commission of Inquiry’ (SN: 28/11/19), which referred to a pardon as granted to me, (yet again) and to his separate enumeration of certain facts of an appeal.
I am alarmed to read the writer’s suggestion that acceptance of a pardon is not necessary for its effectiveness. Such a statement must be rejected immediately as being fundamentally unsound. I must also state that I traveled into Guyana “without hindrance” at various times in the five years between the Full Court dismissal of the appeal in July 2010 and my arrival for the Rodney CoI in February 2015. Hence there is no connection between my free travel and the supposed pardon, which no one has ever mentioned save Mr Nandlall and the former President, Mr Ramotar.
Though the Attorney General at the relevant time, the writer is clearly not acquainted with my case, but may be excused as he was and still is a busy public figure handling many matters simultaneously.
On the separate matter of the appeal, the writer enumerates certain points, which are not in dispute, concluding with the point that the Full Court dismissed an appeal, supposedly filed by me. In passing, he makes an observation which he glosses over, namely, that filing of that appeal was “strange[ly]” in the first place. These are the very facts giving rise to my call for an investigation into that Full Court episode.
I must inform Mr Nandlall that on May 20, 2019, the Court of Appeal ruled the Full Court appeal, and the resulting dismissal, unlawful. Addressing the court that day, I said that (a) person(s) unknown to me had filed the appeal behind my back. This is a serious matter, pointing to a subversion of the rule of law, and it goes beyond incrimination of Donald and Walter Rodney. I therefore trust that Mr Nandlall would support an investigation into this episode in the Full Court that obviously also undermines trust in the judiciary and legal circles. No one is above the law and measures must be put in place to prevent such a recurrence.
Yours faithfully, Donald Rodney