Dear Editor,
The person I may appear to support in this letter is one who has been very helpful to me in several ways, and has supported some of my efforts. I put this out so that the public may be empowered with all the facts in forming an opinion about my arguments, making a judgment of these, my arguments. I do not know the Attorney General personally, although we come from the same area I am told. I never saw Mr Mendonza’s name before and welcome him to the opinion.
His letter in SN (‘The AG has not violated his oath of office,’ December 3) argued very well the need to protect the Attorney General’s privacy. He did not think much of Mr Ram treating the 184-year-old case as irrelevant. I welcome his views as those of a fellow non lawyer. A few points need consideration.
We need to consider why the Constitutional Reform Commission with the PPP included removed the notion of “privacy of home and property,” which appeared in Article 40 of the 1980 Constitution. Only Dr Arif Bulkan waged a campaign for privacy in general. The law-makers ignored his pleas. Perhaps the law allows them to exclude the very idea of privacy and then fall back on it for the private convenience of a ruler. This behaviour does not look like true faith to me. Next, where does the private capacity of Mr Nandlall begin and end and that of the Attorney General begin and end? For me, the oath of office binds a full-time official at midnight as at midday. The Attorney General in his private capacity could not have access to the public funds which he made his own for a private purpose. That behaviour does not “bear true faith and allegiance to the people of Guyana.” It does the opposite.
How many poor wretches in Guyana and elsewhere have had to bear the full brunt of the law for petty theft?
My own letter on the Attorney General, the one under discussion and others I have seen respected the AG’s privacy more than he did in his conversation with a news reporter.
There is much more; I keep it short but I wonder whether there is not a case for an existing tribunal on the ground of discriminatory treatment.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
