It continues to mystify that there is so much manufactured anxiety over alleged “chaos” if Charandass Persaud’s dispositive No-Confidence vote is held by the Court to be illegal. “Retroactivity” is the latest golem paraded around by misinformation peddlers in Guyana’s legal precincts as part of the frenzied push by the Opposition and self-interested parties to truncate the Coalition’s 5-year term.
The key fact is that the Court would be on solid ground to require retroactivity if there is a credible expectation that extirpation of the fraud would lead to different results; however, this would not be the case in anything but the No-Confidence vote.
In the case of previous legislation, to order re-votes would be frivolous and a waste of time since the Coalition does not need elections to replace dissenting or illegally-seated legislators on its List. The legal expulsion of Charandass Persaud from Parliament and replacement with MP Pilgrim speaks authoritatively to this reality (that said, those so inclined should be free to mount idle challenges to any old votes that strike their fancy).
It is pellucid that no voter was disenfranchised by the expulsion of MP Persaud. Charandass has no electoral constituency in Law. The agency for his selection as a Member of Parliament is the AFC party which faced the electorate at the polls in a coalition with APNU. This confusion is the result of a deliberate effort by the ‘overthrow now’ crowd to deceptively conflate the directly-elected Constituency legislator with the Party List system of representation.
Ironic that the singular anachronism in this imbroglio is the Guyana Constitution provision permitting the fall of a legally elected government by the self-serving vote of a freelancing MP not beholden to any constituency in the land.
This reminds me of Moses Nagamootoo speaking of the AFC holding APNU to account for bad behavior by stressing that the PARTY (12 votes) which faced the electorate would walk . . . not him, not any individual.
That’s logically how it should be; but our Constitution provides otherwise.
A moot point because the MP casting the deciding vote on December 21 was likely seated illegally. The case for nullification and/or re-vote is clear.