Guyanese to make decision on death penalty

GENEVA, CMC – Guyana has told the United Nations Human Rights Committee that its citizens will decide on the issue of the death penalty, even as there are no plans by the government to boost the capacity to execute anyone under the current laws.

Governance Minister Gail Teixeira said a similar process was undertaken between 1999- 2001 and the popular view was that the death penalty should remain on the books.

“So, there is no view in Guyana right now that we go back to executions of any kind and so it is a ad hoc or informal moratorium that we have maintained from 1997 to now,” she told the UNHRC during her virtual address.

“To further strengthen our argument, the government has put no heads of prison service, no heads of the Ministry of Home Affairs, put any investments of funds into developing any capacity to execute anyone,” she added.

Guyana has not carried out an execution since 1997 and political and legal observers said that although the death penalty has not been removed from the Constitution or the statute, the matter will have to go back to Parliament.

Guyana and other Caribbean countries have come under pressure from several international agencies, including the International Commission against the Death Penalty, to abolish the death penalty which they consider to be cruel and inhumane punishment.

In 2022, The Guyana Court of Appeal refused to strike down the death penalty as unconstitutional.

During her appearance, Teixeira told the UNHRC that Georgetown could not at the moment implement Public Disclosure and Whistleblowers laws.

“We are unable to, at this point, to activate the Public Disclosure and Whistleblower Act because there are genuine problems of implementation,” she said, noting however, that witnesses are offered “safe haven” protection by police.

With regards to the implementation of the now repealed State Assets Recovery Act (SARA) following the closure of the agency in 2020, Teixeira said that the “monolithic” body “had to be repaired” because its head could have become the Chief Immigration Officer, Police Commissioner, Director of Public Prosecutions among others.

Instead, she said the government was relying on the Guyana Police Force’s Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU), the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Director of Public Prosecutions through strengthening of the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering of Financing Terrorism Act (AML/CFT) “to have a modern confiscation framework inclusive of an asset recovery fund as well as asset sharing arrangements domestically and internationally”.

She said an AML/CFT amendment in 2023 provides for civil forfeiture.

She said a number of assets had been confiscated under the new legislative regime.

On the issue of no investigation into alleged corruption by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, the Governance Minister said no one had lodged a police complaint about the claims that had been made in a US Vice News report.

“There is no follow-up on it because there was no police report made by Vice News or anybody else and so the police cannot investigate without some form of report or complaint,” she told the UN Human Rights Committee, adding that the video had publicly responded to those allegations in media that had carried the issue.

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