Border Controversy: UN Security Council against threats, use of force & escalation of tensions
See below full statement:
The members of the Security Council expressed their concern about the possible escalation of tensions between Venezuela and Guyana. They urged the parties to exercise maximum restraint, reminding them of their obligations to comply with the Order of Provisional Measures issued by the International Court of Justice on 1 December 2023.
The Council also underlined the importance of maintaining regional peace and security and ensuring that the Latin America and Caribbean region remains a Zone of Peace. In this regard, it commended regional efforts which resulted in the conclusion of the Declaration of Peace and Dialogue of Argyle of 14 December 2023 in which Guyana and Venezuela, inter alia, agreed that any controversy between the two states will be resolved in accordance with international law, including the Geneva Agreement of 1966.
The members of the Security Council urged the parties to resolve their differences through peaceful means and to uphold their obligations under international law and the United Nations Charter. They also stressed the importance of regional actors playing a facilitating role in easing the tensions.
The members of the Security Council reaffirmed the importance of upholding the principles of respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity and the prohibition to any party, on the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state, as enshrined in Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter.
The promulgation by Venezuela of its Law on the Defense of the Guiana Essequiba that is a further step in complete violation of the issuance of Provisional Measures by the ICJ on 1 December 2023 as well as the Argyle Declaration of 14 December 2023 and the previous decision of the UNSC constitutes a grave step that confirms the untrustworthiness of President Nicolas Maduro and the conundrum that he weaves on the illegal claim to three quarters of Guyanese territory.
In the face of this vaunted lawlessness and insult to the ICJ’s jurisprudence it has the audacity and total lack of credibility to submit a Memorial to the ICJ basing its outlandish claim on history that has no relevance to justify its wholly illegal encroachment on legitimate Guyanese territorial integrity.
Those Caribbean leaders who witnessed the Argyle debacle of a Declaration on Peace and Security must surely come to the conclusion that they were used and abused and can longer do business with an established double dealer Head of State bent on appropriating foreign territory of one its Caricom partners in the most shameless and imperialistic manner.
I wish to know whether Guyana has brought this development to the President of Brazil and PM Gonzales in accordance with Argyle but I fully support Guyana referring the matter to the UNSC where Guyana is at present the Chairman.
I got the impression that Argyle was fabricated to preempt Guyana from referring this matter to the UNSC directly by Maduro and to use weak dispute settlement informal
procedures of Argyle that I found to be wanting and with no teeth.
Guyana must take advantage of its UNSC’s membership to prosecute its defense of its landed patrimony that generates huge maritime benefits to its people. My regret is that it has to use so much of its windfall resources to buy planes from India and patrol boats from France when these resources could have been utilised to develop its own infrastructure and the lives of its creative and progressive people.
But Maduro in this regard is an agent of the makers of the armaments of war. He is an ever present danger to peace and security in the Caribbean and Latin America and the July Presidential elections must remove this tyrant from the political theaters of the region
If only, every world organization everywhere could have worked diligently and with support from every nation for 75 years, Palestine would have realized their status as a State. Instead, the colonizer and occupier, with staunch support from their “grandfather”, with Germany, France and the UK, the colonizer of Palestine,
believed god gave some people this land, without any legal documentation such as “lifetime lease, transported land or title to Palestine” where the original Palestinians lived until another colonizer, occupier wants the entire
land, seizing piece by piece with illegal settlers.