Dear Editor,
Senior Counsel Mr. Ralph Ramkarran’s column in the Sunday Stabroek last week on presidential immunities under Article 182 of the Constitution was quite hard hitting. Not only does he believe that the immunities are too wide, but he recommends “cleansing the Consti-tution of this diabolical travesty of equating our president to a monarch”. Of the three provisions in the Article, his criticism was in respect to Article 182 (2).
By his interpretation, by virtue of Article 182 (2), a President who shoots a Regent Street shopper dead, “would be immune from prosecution even after he or she ceases to be President”. I have a very different understanding of the provision. Article 182 (2) states that while any person holds or performs the function of President, s/he would enjoy immunity from criminal proceedings for acts done in his/her private capacity, and from civil proceedings for any act of omission or commission, again in his/her private capacity. (Emphasis added). It might have been useful if Mr. Ramkarran had also linked such a scenario to the constitution’s impeachment Article.
Attributing his understanding to the work of the Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC) of 1999 – 2000, Mr. Ramkarran was uncertain whether the failure of the CRC to make any recommendation on the (immunity) issue in 2000 was the result of “opposition, omission or oversight”. He speculated that “if the issue was discussed … the PPP/C was alarmed at the intensity of violent opposition to it and feared vendetta in the form of harassment by way of meritless, criminal prosecution, public or private against its president”, clearly meaning the PPP/C’s president. From a comparison of Article 182 before and after the CRC process, it is obvious that there were minor amendments to the Article. Those amendments could of course, have been inserted by the Oversight Committee established by the National Assembly to prepare the legislation to give effect to the CRC’s recommendations.
The suggestion by Mr. Ramkarran is that the PPP/C’s alarm could only be referring to the PNC’s opposition to any proposal at substantive amendments. The CRC report, which includes the submissions from the PPP/C and from the PNC, tells a different narrative. The sum total of the PPP/C’s submission on its desired constitutional changes covered just over three pages. That Party also submitted an 8-page addendum which appears to have been the text of the Party’s oral presentation, looking backward, replete with sanctimonious rhetoric and political attacks, but containing no further proposals. By contrast, the PNC’s submission covered some 20 pages and a separate 18-page State Paper on the Re-organisation of the Local Government System in Guyana.
By any standard, the PNC took the reform process seriously while the submission of the PPP/C in many cases lacked specifics (the Preamble), sometimes clarity (Parliament) and often, substance. In total, the PPP/C’s submission was wholly inadequate and undeserving of such a historic opportunity. In relation to the presidency, its recommendations were a two-term limit and the removal of the power of the President to dissolve Parliament, hardly epochal. As a member of the PPP/C’s top leadership, its lead lawyer on, and Chairman of the CRC, Mr. Ramkarran would be presumed to have had a role in the Party’s submission.
The PNC’s submission was presented under twelve headings including Society and the State, the Electoral System, Parliament, Local Government, Presidency, Ombudsman and the Auditor General, Fundamental Rights, The Rule of Law and the Judiciary, Public Service, and Race Relations. One feature of the PNC’s submission which I find particularly attractive was the introduction of election of independent candidates.
The thinness of the PPP/C’s recommendations and its failure to advance some of the more progressive recommendations by the Private Sector Commission, the Labour Movement, the PNC and the WPA and the many others who appeared before the Commission, lend credence to the suspicion that the PPP only pays lip service to constitutional reform when in opposition. While this criticism has also been made of the PNC, their recommendations were made when the Party was in opposition and a smart and willing PPP/C would have called the PNC’s bluff by advancing their recommendations to the wider CRC.
Co-incidentally, the PPP/C’s ambivalence on constitutional reform was evident in two articles by Mr. Ramkarran published in the Kaieteur News of 21 July 2013 and July 2015. In the 2013 piece, he revealed that he was accused of making “too many concessions to the Opposition during the CRC process” and in the later article, he names two leading PPP/C’s members who had sought to reverse the Party’s earlier position on the two-term limitation on the presidency. That was probably a feeler initiated by Mr. Jagdeo who had demitted office after serving two and one-half terms as President. That feeler was squelched by the General Secretary of the PPP/C Donald Ramotar who publicly announced that he would seek the Party’s nomination for the Presidency in the 2011 elections.
Properly interpreted, the immunities are not unreasonable. Rather, what is truly a diabolical creation of the 1980 Constitution is the all-powerful Executive Presidency whose holder is more answerable to his Party’s Congress and to a Cabinet appointed by her or him than to the people or their parliamentary representatives; makes an overwhelming majority of constitutional and statutory appointments, including members of the Integrity Commission, Boards and Agencies; who is the sole authority for the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry; and of all diplomatic representatives; who pays no taxes but yet grants concessions as if s/he owns Guyana; and who can refuse to assent to legislation passed even unanimously by the people’s parliamentary representatives. Worse, the President exercises these powers even as Head of a Minority Government.
I am asking all our political commentators, academics and journalists to name me a single democracy – including monarchies – where one person enjoys such powers. It is the executive presidency which is the real diabolical travesty. And that is what cries out for cleansing.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
