May 12, 2020 News
Commissioner Vincent Alexander told reporters yesterday that it is his understanding that the CARICOM recount, which was previously aborted, was aborted due to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) receiving legal advice from the Attorney General’s Chambers.
It is his view that it was not the interim injunctions granted by Justice Franklyn Holder that blocked the recount. The interim injunctions granted by Justice Holder, prompted by the applicant and APNU+AFC candidate Ulita Moore, are documented, though Alexander said yesterday that it is his understanding that they were never granted.
After it was brought to his attention that interim injunctions were indeed granted, Alexander said that, as far as he knows, whatever Justice Holder did, did not hold up the GECOM process.
“When the CARICOM effort was aborted, most people seem to have forgotten that it was in the first instance on the advice of the Attorney General’s Chamber that this thing was aborted,” Alexander said.
A March 17 letter from Chief Parliamentary Counsel Charles Fung-a-Fat contains the advice of the AG’s Chambers.
Fung-a-Fat noted GECOM’s intention to activate Section 22 of the Election Laws (Amendment) Act to remove the difficulties arising with the application of the Representation of the People Act, in its quest to conduct the national recount. In this regard, the argument he proffered is that the “retrospective” modification of Section 84 of the Representation of the People Act would affect a person’s vested rights under the Representation of the People Act. In this regard, the advice held that the order for the recount could not be made.
The advice also held that the activation of Article 162 of the Constitution would require GECOM to comply with the provisions of the Representation of the People Act. Fung-a-Fat stated that the provision allows GECOM to “act administratively through an interpretation of the law as it now stands” and that it does not allow the Commission to modify the law.
“That advice suggested,” Alexander said, “that the law did not provide for us to issue the kind of order we had gone to them to consult on,” he said, indicating that it was GECOM that consulted the AG’s Chambers.
The Court of Appeal had indicated that GECOM would not delegate its constitutionally mandated supervisory authority to another body, where the conduct of the electoral process is concerned.
And even before the Court made its final orders in that regard, GECOM had gone ahead with its planning for the current recount, after removing from the discourse any language which suggests that GECOM is abdicating its supervisory power.
Commissioner Sase Gunraj had explained, after a Commission meeting, that CARICOM was never meant to supervise the recount, but that the word was very loosely used in the aide memoire governing the recount.
“What held up the recount or stopped the recount, for all intents and purposes at the level of GECOM, was the advice we got from the AG’s Chambers. Because of that advice, when we went back into the recount mode, we made sure it was no longer a CARICOM supervised recount.”
GECOM has since begun that recount, on the legal grounds of Article 162 of the Constitution and Section 22 of the Election Laws (Amendment) Act.