President meets King, David Cameron: UK restates pledge to Guyana in border controversy
President Irfaan Ali has met with King Charles III and the new British Foreign Secretary David Cameron in Dubai.
In an invited comment following his meeting with Cameron, a former British Prime Minister, President Ali said the United Kingdom restated their commitment to support Guyana in its position that an arbitration award of 1899 settled the boundary line between Guyana and Venezuela.
Venezuela has set a public vote for this Sunday which Guyana says is intended to be used as a trigger to seize the Essequibo, a resource-rich region that has been Guyanese territory since the 1899 award.
Guyana has taken the border case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) but has asked the court for provisional measures in light of the referendum on December 3.
Upon a referral made by the United Nations Secretary-General, Guyana in March 2018 moved to the court for a full and final settlement to Venezuela’s rejection of the arbitral award which settled the boundaries of the two countries 124 years ago.
Venezuela has refused to recognise the right of the court to determine the case, but the court has said it does.
Guyana has stated to the court that the referendum serves “to obtain responses that would support Venezuela’s decision to abandon [the current proceedings before the Court], and to resort instead to unilateral measures to ‘resolve’ the controversy with Guyana by formally annexing and integrating into Venezuela all of the territories at issue in these proceedings, which comprises more than two-thirds of Guyana.”
In the arbitral tribunal award of October 3rd, 1899, the borders of Guyana (then British Guiana) and Venezuela were settled, with Venezuela inheriting 13,000 square kilometers of what was then British Guiana territory – an area bigger than Jamaica or Lebanon.
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.
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 its case.
