Civil society group, the Forum on Solidarity and Effectiveness (FES) is engaged in a process to enable the commitments from the stakeholder meetings in the wake of the two massacres to be fulfilled.
The commitments were in doubt after the recent deadlock in Parliament between the government and the opposition over several amendments that the opposition parties wanted. In a statement, the FES said that the parliamentary parties had failed to engage civil society stakeholders in their attempts to resolve differences over amendments to the motion proposed to the National Assembly by Prime Minister Sam Hinds on March 27.
The motion followed the stakeholders meeting with President Bharrat Jagdeo in the wake of the two massacres at Lusignan and Bartica.
According to a press release from the FES, representatives from 32 civic organizations from Regions One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven and Ten met last Saturday at the Demerara Life Confer-ence Room to continue work on critical issues identified in the earlier FES forum.
The release said that the meeting focused on a review of the stakeholder agenda that agreed on implementation within 90 days.
During the FES review it was decided that the stakeholder process, despite its limitations, provided an opportunity to test the right of citizens embodied in Article 13 and entrenched in Article 149C of the Consti-tution to participate in decisions which affect them.
Moreover, it was agreed that the “parliamentary impasse should be viewed as a failure to place sufficient attention on managing a new process, rather than on a flawed stakeholder process.”
The civic organizations also concluded that any new initiative to activate the principles embedded in Article 13 will be faced with similar challenges of grafting these principles onto the existing parliamentary system.
And regarding the substance of the stakeholder recommendations, the FES agreed on a review of the specific tasks required to implement the committees and commissions as currently set out in the constitution.
It was decided also to establish a working group to identify substantive issues in the present formulation with respect to “principles, powers, structure and membership which may be at variance with proposals recommended to parliament by the Consti-tutional Reform Commis-sion”. The working group will report back in two weeks time, the release stated.
Meantime, the FES agreed to the convening of another FES forum within the next month to consider proposals by the working group and the submission of agreed recommendations to parliamentary parties (PPP/C, PNCR-1G, AFC, GAP-ROAR) through the stakeholder process. The parliamentary parties would then have one month of the original 90 days to complete its work in parliament, the release said.
And referring to other priority matters arising from the FES meeting earlier last month, the working group on community policing reported on its participation in the meeting called by the Minister of Home Affairs to review the work of the Community Policing Groups (CPGs). The FES working group which now numbers 10 civic organizations made a submission on community-based policing and the next step is for this group to engage in discussions with the national body of CPGs.
The sponsoring organizations of the FES are the Afri-can Cultural Development Association (ACDA), Amer-indian Peoples Association (APA), Clerical and Commercial Workers Union (CCWU), Guyana Council of Churches (GCC), Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), Institute of Development Studies (IDS), National Association of Agricultural, Commercial and Industrial Employees (NAACIE), and Red Thread.
