Guyana’s Legal professional Common and Minister of Authorized Affairs, Mohabir Anil Nandlall, S.C., has firmly rejected current calls from opposition-nominated commissioners on the Guyana Elections Fee (GECOM) to permit prisoners to vote within the upcoming September 1, 2025 common and regional elections. He described the proposal as a “last-ditch try and disrupt the electoral course of.”
Whereas there isn’t a legislation explicitly barring prisoners from voting, Nandlall identified that “no authorized framework presently exists to facilitate voting by individuals who’re both serving sentences or are on remand.”
Talking on his weekly programme Points within the Information on Tuesday night, the Legal professional Common questioned the timing and motives behind the opposition’s push, particularly coming simply three months earlier than the polls.
“From 1964 to 1992, didn’t they know that prisoners weren’t voting? And even earlier than that, in 1957, they didn’t know that prisoners weren’t voting in Guyana since elections began in Guyana in 1953? These are gents who’re of their seventies; they’re not spring chickens. They don’t know that prisoners haven’t voted earlier than?” Nandlall mentioned.
He emphasised that the Individuals’s Nationwide Congress Reform (PNC/R), a significant political social gathering, had by no means raised the problem of prisoners voting throughout its greater than seventy years in Guyana’s political panorama.
“They by no means championed the reason for prisoners voting throughout all these years. There has not been any change within the legislation since. How is it, swiftly, three months earlier than elections, this is a matter of some rivalry?” the Legal professional Common questioned.
Nandlall additional defined that Guyana’s voting system derives from British colonial traditions, noting: “Traditionally, within the Commonwealth… prisoners typically didn’t vote in England for a whole bunch of years. And that system was handed down. That custom and that conference was handed down.”
He added that since imprisonment entails the lack of a number of freedoms, voting might traditionally have been considered one of them by default. To permit prisoners to vote, the federal government would wish to make a transparent coverage determination, move new legal guidelines, and undertake substantial administrative preparations.
“It’s important to have the legislative framework… after which you’ll have to have the logistics and lots of, many logistics to assume [through],” Nandlall mentioned.
He sharply criticised the opposition-nominated GECOM commissioners for elevating the problem at this stage, accusing them of utilizing the talk as a tactic to delay elections.
“That’s how that these guys can’t be real. They don’t seem to be real once they purport to talk as if they’re Democrats… You understand that it’s hypocritical. You understand that it’s duplicitous…The one ulterior motive would have been to frustrate and delay the elections, and so they have misplaced abysmally,” he mentioned.
The Legal professional Common’s place is supported by Individuals’s Progressive Social gathering (PPP)-nominated Commissioner Sase Gunraj, who additionally famous that there isn’t a laws enabling GECOM to permit prisoners to vote and questioned the timing of the opposition’s push.
Gunraj revealed that GECOM has already voted on the matter, confirming that prisoners won’t be allowed to vote within the September 1, 2025 elections.
