Published, Not Served: The Legal Vacuum Behind GPF’s Rolling List of Named Traffic Offenders

Published, Not Served: The Legal Vacuum Behind GPF’s Rolling List of Named Traffic Offenders

 0PINION BY: Hem Kumar —September 2026 

 Since President Irfaan Ali’s declaration that government would begin “publishing  the names of individuals with the highest number of outstanding traffic offences” as a matter of accountability policy, the Guyana Police Force has been doing precisely that not once, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a running institutional practice now stretching past one hundred and twenty pages. A list dated 27 August 2026 and circulated under the banner “GUYANA POLICE FORCE — OUTSTANDING TRAFFIC TICKETS — PUBLICATION LIST,” broadcast through the Force’s own Radio Eve Leary channel and redistributed via Facebook and unsolicited text message, places on publicly circulated  pages  the full names, vehicle registration numbers, and ticket counts of Guyanese citizens, some appearing under four separate registrations, their entire unresolved driving history rendered as a public ledger.

A Sample with Names and Plate numbers redacted

The 592 Guardian has examined the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, Chapter 51:02, in both its current L.R.O. 1/2012 revision and its 1998 predecessor, together with the enforcement provisions of the Summary Jurisdiction (Procedure) Act. The finding is unambiguous: no provision in either statute authorises the Guyana Police Force, the Traffic Department, or any other arm of the executive to publish the identities and violation histories of individual citizens as a mechanism of notice, service, or enforcement. The publication drive rests on nothing more than presidential policy announcement — exercised in a jurisdiction where the one law capable of constraining such disclosure, the Data Protection Act 2023, remains without a functioning commencement order more than three years after passage.

The Act tells you exactly how a citizen is meant to learn they are in breach of it. Mass publication is not that method — it appears nowhere in its 118 sections.

WHAT THE ACT ACTUALLY REQUIRES

Section 8 of the Summary Jurisdiction (Procedure) Act establishes the traffic ticket itself as the statutory notice mechanism: a document issued by a member of the Guyana Police Force to an individual at the point an offence is committed or alleged. Section 45 of the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act (numbered 46 in the 1998 revision) reinforces this for the offences most commonly ticketed — speeding, reckless or dangerous driving, careless driving, by requiring that a person cannot be convicted unless one of three conditions is met: a contemporaneous warning at the scene; a summons served on the accused within fourteen days; or written notice served personally or sent by registered post to the accused or the vehicle’s registered owner, also within fourteen days.

Every one of these mechanisms is individualised, time-bound, and directed at a named recipient. None contemplates public disclosure as an alternative or supplement. The Act’s drafters anticipated the problem of an offender who cannot be traced — the proviso at s.45(i)(A) excuses non-compliance only where “neither the name and address of the accused nor the name and address of the owner of the vehicle could with reasonable diligence have been ascertained” — but even this exception produces no publication remedy. It simply permits conviction to proceed without the normally-required notice. At no point does the statute pivot to public identification as a substitute for individualised service.

“PUBLICATION” UNDER THE ACT MEANS SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY

The Act does contain a publication provision — but it is not the one the Force’s list rests on, whether by design or by conflation. Section 105 (Cap. 51:02, L.R.O. 1/2012) reads in full:

“All orders made by the Minister or by the Commissioner of Police under the powers conferred upon them by this Act shall be published in the Gazette, and shall come into operation on the date of such publication or on such later date as may be specified in the order.”

This is a transparency requirement running in the opposite direction from what the Force’s list purports to do. It obliges the state to publish its own rules — speed limit orders, road-use restrictions, parking designations, and the regulations the Minister is empowered to make under section 104 covering vehicle construction, driver licensing, and public service vehicle conduct — before those rules can bind the public. It has no bearing on, and cannot reasonably be extended to cover, the publication of a private citizen’s name, registration number, and personal violation count. The same logic that requires government to publish its rules before enforcing them contains no reciprocal power to publish a citizen’s record before, or instead of, serving them.

Section 104’s regulation-making power is itself bounded by an exhaustive list; vehicle construction and weight, identification marks, speed limits, driver licensing and testing, traffic and pedestrian regulation, public service vehicle conduct, and goods vehicle conditions — with breach penalties capped at ten thousand dollars or three months’ imprisonment. Nothing in that list, and nothing in the adjoining section 106 (governing duplicate licenses and certificates, a wholly unrelated administrative matter), supplies the missing authority.

A POLICY RUNNING AHEAD OF THE LAW

The publication drive traces to a Department of Public Information report in which President Ali, addressing the rollout of the Safe Road Intelligent System’s automated camera network, announced that government would begin naming individuals with the highest volumes of outstanding tickets. “This is about accountability,” the President said. “The system will only work if we have compliance. And Guyana must do better.” At the time of that announcement, the electronic system had already generated 42,000 tickets, of which only 10,000 had been paid; a compliance gap the publication list appears designed to close through public pressure rather than through any of the enforcement pathways the Act actually provides.

That framing is telling in itself: the President described the measure in the language of policy and compliance strategy, not in the language of legal notice or statutory service. Nothing in the public record reviewed by this newsroom shows the policy being implemented through an amendment to the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, a regulation made and gazetted under section 104/105, or any other instrument that would bring it within the Act’s framework. It appears, instead, to have moved directly from presidential announcement to operational practice; a Traffic Chief briefing the public on outstanding balances via Radio Eve Leary, and a rolling published list executed by the Force without any visible statutory footing.

THE DATA PROTECTION GAP

The absence of authority under the traffic Act would matter less if Guyana’s data protection framework were positioned to test the practice on separate grounds. It is not. The Data Protection Act 2023 (Act No. 18 of 2023) received presidential assent in August 2023 and would, on its face, govern precisely this kind of processing — the collection, keeping, and dissemination of personal data by a public authority. But as of the most recent independent confirmation available to this newsroom, the Act has not been brought into force. Its commencement requires an order that, unlike the parallel Digital Identity Card Act — gazzetted and operational since March 2026; has not been issued. A Data Protection Commissioner has been appointed and describes the Data Protection Office as still being “actively engaged in the process of formally establishing” itself, language that stops short of confirming the Act’s substantive and enforcement provisions are live.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The European Union Election Observation Mission’s final report on Guyana’s September 2025 general and regional elections explicitly warned government to “activate the 2023 Data Protection Act to block a repeat of the malicious use of Guyanese personal data,” after finding that “politically motivated doxing occurred with impunity” in the absence of an operative law and a functioning Data Protection Office. That warning, issued in November 2025, addressed the exposure of cash-grant recipients’ personal data. It applies with equal force to a state agency mass-publishing the names, vehicle registrations, and violation histories of ordinary drivers; some of whom, like the four registrations listed under a single name on page 81 of the 27 August list, have their entire outstanding record compiled into a single public profile with no visible mechanism to contest an entry before it appears.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE TICKET LIST

The traffic list is a small case with a large implication. Guyana is administering an automated, camera-driven ticketing regime — the Safe Road Intelligent System; capable of generating tens of thousands of penalties with minimal human discretion, while simultaneously running a compliance-pressure publication campaign built on no statutory authority, inside a data protection regime that exists in statute but not in practice.

The Force has separately had to warn the public that fraudulent text messages impersonating GPF ticket notices are circulating and directing people instead to the official lookup at speed.gpf.gov.gy. That warning was necessary precisely because GPF-branded, personally identifying financial and legal information moving through informal channels; text blasts, Facebook shares — has become common enough to require a fraud advisory. A genuine GPF publication list, moving through the same informal channels the Force has warned the public to distrust, does nothing to narrow that confusion.

Nothing in this analysis suggests the underlying debts are fictitious, or that the individuals named do not in fact owe outstanding fines. The question this newsroom is raising is narrower and more fundamental: by what legal authority is that information being made public, in this form, through this channel, absent the individualised notice the Act requires and absent any operative check under the law meant to govern the handling of personal data? On the present record, the answer appears to be none. The publication rests on executive policy alone — announced by the President, executed by the Police Force, and unreviewable by any data protection authority that does not yet exist in practice.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES

The 592 Guardian is putting the following questions to the Guyana Police Force, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Attorney General’s Chambers, and will publish any response in full:

1. Under what specific statutory provision, regulation, or Cabinet instrument is the Guyana Police Force publishing named individuals’ outstanding traffic ticket records?
2. Does the Force consider inclusion on this list to constitute legal notice for the purposes of section 45 of the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, and if so, on what basis?
3. What mechanism, if any, exists for a listed individual to contest an entry before or after publication?
4. Has the Attorney General’s Chambers issued any opinion on the compatibility of this practice with the Data Protection Act 2023, notwithstanding its non-commencement?

A government that campaigned on transparency owes the public more than the assurance that the underlying debts are real. It owes an accounting of the authority under which their disclosure is made. Until that authority is shown, the publication list is not accountability. It is exposure without a statute behind it.

— The Board