Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman says Guyana doesn't "Feel the impetus right now" to abolish the death penalty. Photo: Caribbean360

And even if it eventually comes up for consideration, the people of the country would have a say in the matter.

On the heels of a United Nations Human Rights Representative calling on the country to review the death penalty, Minister of Natural Resources Raphael Trotman said yesterday that Guyana doesn’t “feel the impetus right now”.

He noted that the government had found itself in a situation where credible international organizations, like the Financial Action Task Force, were calling on it to enact certain laws while others were urging that those laws be abolished.

Guyana recently introduced laws against the financing of terrorism, which list the death penalty as punishment.

“There is a strong clamour for the return of the death penalty…We have no intentions of enforcing it but at the present time, the Government is not in a rush to remove it from the books,” he said at the post-Cabinet media briefing yesterday.

The People’s Say

There has been a moratorium on the death penalty in Guyana since the early 1990s. Both Trotman, an attorney-at-law, and President David Granger made it clear that if government wanted to go the route of going a step further to abolish capital punishment, there would have to be widespread consultation.

The call for a review of the death penalty had come from Assistant Secretary-General of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN, Ivan Simonovic, during a meeting with President Granger.

The Guyanese leader made his position clear.

“I am advised by Cabinet. I am advised by my coalition partners. I am advised by the National Assembly and in the final analysis, by the people of Guyana. Guyana is an independent sovereign state and it is not for me to get ahead of what the people want. I do not envisage any circumstance under which I would be willing to assent to the death penalty even though it remains on the books,” he said.

“What I would say is that if the Cabinet were to consider it, if the National Assembly were to consider it and even if there was a deadlock, we can go to a Referendum. Let the people say what they want to occur in this jurisdiction; in the state of Guyana. That is transparency; that is openness; that is consultation. What do the people want? So that is my approach.”

Simonovic said he appreciated Granger’s position.