Ever since the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) decided that it intended to remove over 25,000 persons who have not collected their national identification cards since 2008 from the list of electors, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) has been up in arms, claiming that such an action would be illegal. It is as if that party wants us to believe that what is legal or illegal should be our sole concern when it comes to elections management. However, the PPP has participated in the recent establishment of GECOM and it is that body that has decided that these names have to be removed from the electoral list if it is to provide the basis for the conduct of credible, free and fair elections on the 2nd March 2010.
Few would want to argue with the claim that an electoral list that is shorn of those not eligible to vote is a primary condition for conducting credible elections. The other means of verification are similarly important and should not be substituted for a clean list. Multiple voting digitally or at polling places devalues the vote and thus the constitutional right of every citizen. Particularly now, in a context where elections are won by less than 5000 votes, possible opportunities for multiple voting should be immediately removed. Over the years the PPP has been the loudest advocate and defender of free and fair elections, yet today when it still has authority to participate and make the process legal, it has become the defender of an unacceptable status quo. As perceived by GECOM the bloated list developed essentially under the PPP/C’s watch and could and should have long ago been legally removed. The PPP’s unusual behaviour began in about mid-2018 when the PNCR indicated that it intended to support house to house (HtH) registration, and its underhand parliamentary behaviour and many ludicrous appeals to what is lawful since then suggest that the existence of a bloated list plays to its advantage.
All the appeals to what is and is not lawful do not impress me. For reasons such as the above, in my consideration of social issues the nexus between justice and law is paramount for ‘(T)he notion of justice is more ancient than that of law (and) … is equated with moral rightness (ethics), rationality, law, natural law, fairness, righteousness, equality, goodness, and equity.’ Thus I stand with Antigone, when in a play by the great dramatist Sophocles (496 – 406 BCE), when her father King Creon ordered her not to bury the body of her brother as a punishment for the treason he had committed, she risked death by disobeying what she considered an unjust order and buried her brother, claiming that the king had no authority to ‘override the unwritten and unfailing laws given us by the gods (natural law/justice).’
Let me draw to the PPP’s attention that the condition that it has allowed to develop under its watch and now is refusing to cooperate with changing is pernicious and diminishes all of us. The British legal philosopher HLA Hart, (1907 –1992) – ‘a gigantic champion of modern Anglo-English legal theory’ – claimed that ‘distinguishing between the question ‘What is law?, and the question ‘What is morally right?’ has the salutary effect of reminding people that not all laws are morally good and that officials may be held accountable even for their lawful actions when those actions are sufficiently wicked.’ (https://www.britannica.com/topic/ philosophy-of-law).
The Chief Justice and now the GECOM chairperson, Claudette Singh, have rightly stated in relation to a similar situation that: ‘….no right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined….it becomes clear then, that any prohibition, restriction, or limitation on the right to vote must be viewed with a close and critical eye since any such encroachment would be a bar to that voter’s right to have a voice in the elections of his representatives in government.’ My ‘critical eye’ tells me that underlying this statement is not merely a concern that all citizens that are eligible to vote must be allowed to do so, but that all electoral arrangements that could compromise the value of a citizen’s vote are reprehensible and thus should be expunged from the law, but now the party that fostered the problem and possibly has the most to gain from its maintenance is refusing to participate in changing the law.
What are we to do? Stand aside and allow a party that has possibly created a wrong for its own benefit to gain that benefit by being in a position to stymie the wishes of the legal authority (GECOM) that the wrong be removed? I think not! When what is just collides with what is legal the law needs to change and if that is not possible it needs to be tweaked in the process of its implementation to deliver justice. Instead of arguing for the maintenance of the status quo, the PPP should be encouraged to join the process and help to change the law.
It may be true that in behaving the way it is the PPP has opened the door to the possibility of there being a challenge to the elections result, but it is my view that if the PPP makes such a challenge it will most likely lose. The Caribbean Court of Justice provided it with a role in the process that it has refused to take to clean up a mess for which it is largely responsible. So let the PPP take to the court with the reminder that those who go to the law must do so with clean hands, and on my assessment its hands are far from clean.
