New Opposition Leader can determine GECOM’s makeup – legal expert

Last Updated on Saturday, 20 September 2025, 13:38 by Writer

The new Opposition Leader can decide whether any or all three of the opposition-nominated commissioners of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) should be replaced now that We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) has become the new major parliamentary opposition, according to a legal expert.

“A commonsense interpretation alone of the representational character of GECOM Commissioners requires that the new Leader of the Opposition enjoys the flexibility to either retain existing Commissioners or replace them,” says Senior Law Lecturer at the University of Guyana (UG), Neville Bissember in a Demerara Waves Online News opinion piece “GECOM’s composition should reflect “seismic shift” in Guyana’s politics.“

WIN Leader Azruddin Mohamed is on record as saying that he would be entering the National Assembly as Guyana’s Opposition Leader, his party having won 16 seats. Chairman of the People’s National Congress Reform-led A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), Aubrey Norton, up to recently Guyana’s Opposition Leader, said he was not in favour of persuading election commissioners Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman to resign to make way for new commissioners. Mr Trotman earlier this week said if the matter was taken to court, he would abide by the ruling.

Mr Bissember, who holds Masters of Law (LLM) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, says despite the interpretation of Article 225(2) of Guyana’s Constitution that election commissioners are ‘appointed for life’ and can be removed only as a result of sickness, mental illness, or misbehavior, the framers of the country’s Supreme Law must have considered the role of the sitting Opposition Leader who submits his or her nominees to the President.

“This myopic approach fails to take account of the other side of the equation, that is to say, the appointer, who is the Leader of the Opposition at any given point in time, and certainly not the post-holder before 1 September 2025. While it might be correct that the options for removing the sitting opposition commissioners are few, it cannot be the intendment of the draftsman that opposition commissioners would remain in situ if their appointing authority, to wit the Leader of the Opposition, is no longer the same office-holder that first appointed them,” says Mr Bissember, a former Legal Counsel in the Secretariat of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States in Brussels, Belgium.

The UG law lecturer questions how three commissioners selected after a process – that is to say, their appointment was not automatic – by someone who is no longer the Leader of the Opposition, assume that they would automatically continue to enjoy the confidence of the person soon to be nominated from among the other parliamentary members on the opposition benches, as the new Leader of the Opposition, going forward.

Mr Bissember recommends that if the incoming Leader of the Opposition intends to retain any one of the current election commissioners, he should inform him in writing, as well as the President who is the ultimate appointing authority and the GECOM Chairman.

Similarly, he says if any of the other two members, or all three, does not enjoy his confidence, the Leader of the Opposition should so inform them, thanking them for their service, and similarly inform the President as well as the Chairman.

Going forward, in order to fill the vacancies, Mr Bissember says the new Opposition Leader should hold meaningful consultations within the new opposition parliamentary configuration APNU – which has 12 seats and the one-seat Forward Guyana Movement (FGM) – before advising the President of his nominees. “Whether or not that means that either APNU or FGM is entitled to an opposition seat on the Commission is a matter for the consulting parties,” added Mr Bissember.