Border controversy: Extraordinary sitting of National Assembly to be held

The National Assembly will hold an extraordinary sitting to discuss the Guyana/Venezuela border controversy next Friday.

The sitting will be held one month before Venezuela holds a referendum to ask Venezuelans for the creation of a new state, which makes up the territory of Guyana that it claims.

The discussion on the controversy will take the form of a motion; the details of the motion have not yet been published but the members of the 65-seat legislature have been issued a notice of the sitting which will begin at 10:00 hrs.

The Guyana government has condemned what it sees as Venezuela’s expansionist ambitions and said the border controversy should be resolved in court as the case is before the International Court of Justice as dictated by the United Nations Secretary General as the means to settle the controversy.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has noted that the language of two questions approved to be posed in the referendum seeks an affirmation and implementation of Venezuela’s stance on the issue “by all means, according to/with the Law.”  It is open to reasonable persons to conclude that “by all means”, includes means of force or war, CARICOM said in a statement.

“CARICOM earnestly hopes that Venezuela is not raising the prospect of using force or military means to get its own way in this controversy over territory.

“After all, it has been the long-standing position of Latin American and Caribbean counties, including Venezuela, that our region must remain a zone of peace,” CARICOM had stated, urging Venezuela to settle the matter in court.

The borders of Guyana and Venezuela were determined by an arbitral tribunal on October 3rd, 1989, and Venezuela inherited 13,000 square kilometers of Guyana’s territory (then under British rule).

Venezuela was bound under international law to respect that award, which it did for the subsequent six decades. Venezuela, however, at the onset of Guyana’s independence in 1966, resorted to various strategies and challenged the award.

There has been a series of acts of aggression by Presidents of Venezuela against Guyana, starting with a Presidential decree of June 1968 to the time of President Nicolás Maduro Moro’s decree of May 26, 2015, which sought to extend Venezuela’s land claim to also annex the country’s maritime space.

In 2013, Venezuelans sent a naval ship into Guyanese waters and seized a U.S.-chartered oil survey ship and escorted it to Margarita Island. In the same year, a Canadian-based mining company Guyana Goldfields said it had received an notification of possible legal action by Venezuela over its operations in Guyana.

In September 2015, Guyanese authorities also said the Venezuela army was up the Cuyuni River, in the northwest of the country which borders Venezuela.

An agreement reached in Geneva on February 17, 1966, allowed for the United Nations Secretary General to determine a resolution to the controversy and dialogue and talks ensued for decades.

In mid-February 2017, the new UN Secretary-General António Guterres appointed Dag Halvor Nylander of Norway as his Personal Representative on the Border Controversy, in a final effort at dialogue to settle the matter. That failed.

On January 31, 2018, the UN Secretary General referred the matter to the ICJ and Guyana filed it case and the court on April 6 this year ruled that it would go ahead and hear and determine the case.