“NO PERMISSION REQUIRED”

 “NO PERMISSION REQUIRED”

The Kingston Seawall Arrests and the Constitution the State Keeps Forgetting

On the night of July 22, five bold women stood silently on the periphery of a government-organised vigil for the victims of the MV Barima ferry tragedy. They held signs.

They sang no counter-songs, shouted no slogans, disrupted no prayers. By their own account and by the account of no witness yet produced to contradict them, they did nothing but stand, watch, and hold a position on a matter of public consequence. For this, three of them were seized by officers of the Guyana Police Force, one dragged bodily to a police station, booked, detained, and released only after being told they lacked “permission to protest” and were carrying “illegal signs.”

There is no such thing, in the law of Guyana, as an illegal sign. There is no permit regime for peaceful assembly written into the Constitution these officers are sworn to uphold.

There is, instead, Article 147, which states plainly that no person shall be hindered in the enjoyment of the freedom of assembly, association, and the freedom to demonstrate peacefully.

The five women who stood at Kingston seawall on Wednesday night were not testing that provision. They were exercising it, in its most textbook form: silent, peripheral, unobstructive, and squarely on a matter of accountability for a public tragedy.

A charge that is dropped the morning after is a confession that the arrest should never have been made the night before.

THE TELL IS IN WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

The Force did not merely fail to defend its action. It abandoned it. By the following morning, all charges had been withdrawn, and a senior officer offered the women what can only be described as a conditional apology — sorry, but only “if you think you deserve one.” This is not the language of an institution confident it acted within the law. It is the language of an institution that knows precisely what it did, and is hoping the retreat will be quieter than the offence.

  It is damage control, and it should never be mistaken for the former. An apology conditioned on the victim first agreeing she was wronged enough to merit one is not an apology.

It is a further assertion of institutional power — the state deciding, even in retreat, that it alone gets to judge the harm it caused.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND FIVE NAMES

The specific facts here are almost beside the point, and that is precisely why they matter. If the Guyana Police Force can detain five silent, unarmed women standing at the edge of a public commemoration — women whose stated grievance was that the MV Barima tragedy was preventable and that a sitting minister should answer for it — then the constitutional guarantee of peaceful assembly exists only at the discretion of whichever officer is on duty that night.

 That is the real subject of this editorial, and it is why we return to it: not merely to recount what happened to Ms Nageer, Ms Bacchus-Hinds, Ms Collymore, Ms Lucas, and Ms Marcus, but to state without qualification what every citizen of this country is entitled to do, and to have that entitlement mean something the next time officers decide it is inconvenient.

WHAT ARTICLE 147 ACTUALLY GUARANTEES

Citizens of Guyana have :

◊ The constitutional right to assemble peacefully, in public, without seeking prior permission from the police, a minister, or any organ of the State.

◊ They have the right to hold signs criticising government officials by name, including ministers, up to and including calls for resignation or prosecution, provided the message itself does not incite violence or unlawful conduct.

◊ They have the right to do this at or near a state-organized event, so long as they do not obstruct, harass, or physically interfere with that event or its participants — a standard the five women plainly met, by the uncontested account of organisers and passersby alike.

◊ And they have the right, if none of this is honoured, to refuse to move on an officer’s say-so alone, and to ask that officer to cite the specific law allegedly being broken — a question the officers at Kingston seawall were, tellingly, unable to answer.

None of this required a permit that was never applied for, because no such permit exists to apply for.

None of it required the vigil organisers’ consent, because the seawall on that night was a public space, not a private one. And none of it was forfeited when the women declined to be moved, because the constitutional right to remain does not expire the moment an officer would prefer that it did.

THE LINE THIS NEWS MEDIA DRAWS

We publish this not as commentary on one bad night, but as a standing reference.                                                                                                          The right to peaceful assembly in this country is not contingent on the mood of the officer nearest you, the convenience of the event you are standing beside, or the popularity of the message on your sign. It is written into the supreme law of Guyana, and it does not require police permission to exercise — which is precisely the phrase the arresting officers got backwards.

It is the State that requires permission, under Article 147, before it may hinder a citizen’s peaceful assembly. It is not the citizen who requires permission to assemble.

The women arrested at Kingston seawall are reportedly weighing a constitutional case. This publication institutional position is stated plainly: they should bring it, and the constitutional court should be given the opportunity to say, once and unambiguously, what an apology offered on condition of the victim’s gratitude cannot say —.                  “that this was unlawful, that it does not become lawful because the charges were later dropped, and that the remedy is not silence at the top and forgetting at the bottom, but consequence for those who ordered five silent women removed from a public seawall for carrying signs the officers could not name a single law against.”

— The Board