In a long awaited decision, the outgoing UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has decided that the Good Offices process to find a solution to the decades-old border controversy between Guyana and Venezuela will be given one more year and if by the end of 2017 “significant progress” has not been made, the case will move to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Guyana this evening welcomed the decision.
For the last two years, Guyana has been pressing for a judicial settlement of the controversy, arguing that the Good Offices process has yielded no progress in decades and that Caracas continues to destabilise this country’s progress. Georgetown had argued that for its entire 50 years of independence, Venezuela has used the border controversy to undermine this country’s development.
The appeal
