SAFE COUNTRY, WATCHED COUNTRY

SAFE COUNTRY, WATCHED COUNTRY

Guyana Is Building a Surveillance State by Announcement, Not by Law

EDITORIAL◊THE 592 GUARDIAN◊AUGUST,2026

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has now said it twice, four years apart, with the same casual confidence: cameras with facial-recognition software are going up “right across the country.” In November 2022 it was a plan. In February 2025 it was a fact on the ground. In both cases it was announced the way this Government announces most things it does not intend to submit for scrutiny — as an achievement, not as a policy requiring authorization, oversight, or a single line of enabling legislation specific to biometric surveillance.

“Safe Country” or Invasion of Privacy?

This is the pattern The 592 Guardian has documented across a dozen files this year: capacity is built and declared before the legal architecture that would make it accountable is built at all. The Data Protection Act No. 18 of 2023 received presidential assent three years ago. By the reporting available to us, it has still not commenced, because the ministerial order needed to bring it into force has not been made, and the Data Protection Office the Act contemplates has not been established.

A law can sit on the books indefinitely in Guyana while the practice it was meant to govern proceeds anyway. That is not an oversight. It is becoming the operating model.

WHAT THE LAW WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

Had the Act commenced, a nationwide facial-recognition network would not automatically be illegal — but it would be answerable. The statute’s own definition of “sensitive personal data” is instructive, and it should worry anyone who has ever attended a political meeting, a religious service, or a protest in this country. The Act names political opinions and membership of a political body as sensitive categories in their own right, alongside religious belief, health, sexual life, and criminal proceedings.

A camera on a public road is not neutral once it can tell the State who was praying, who was marching, and who was standing next to whom.

Facial-recognition templates are not listed by name as a standalone sensitive category in the Act’s summary text available to us — an omission that itself deserves legislative attention — but that silence is not a license. A face, once matched against a database, is personal data the moment it identifies a living individual, and it becomes sensitive personal data the moment that identification reveals political opinion, religious belief, health status, or alleged criminal involvement. Attendance at a PPP rally, a APNU+AFC meeting, a mosque, a church, a mandir, a picket line outside Parliament, or a lawyer’s office are not abstract hypotheticals in Guyana’s political climate.

They are the precise activities a nationwide camera-and-matching system would be positioned to record, store, and cross-reference — without a Data Protection Office to answer to, because none exists.

EIGHT QUESTIONS THE GOVERNMENT HAS NOT ANSWERED

The 592 Guardian’s position is not that Guyana should have no cameras. Public safety is a legitimate government interest, and CCTV recording an event for later review is categorically different from a system that can identify and track a citizen in real time against a watchlist. It is that distinction — event-recording versus identification-and-tracking — that the Government has never publicly acknowledged, let alone regulated.

Before another camera goes up, the public is owed answers to at least the following:

• Which agency owns and controls each camera network, and under what statutory authority.
• Whether facial recognition is operational, on trial, or merely proposed — Jagdeo’s own statements have blurred this for four years.
• What databases or watchlists a face or number plate is matched against.
• Who is authorized to run a search, and on what legal threshold.
• How long footage, templates, and match records are retained before deletion.
• What independent body audits the system and hears complaints of misuse.
• What remedy exists for a citizen wrongly flagged by a false match.
• Whether an ordinary Guyanese can obtain the footage and data held about them — and on what timeline before it is overwritten.

Jagdeo has also linked the initiative to “potential use by the banking sector,” a phrase that should have drawn far more scrutiny than it has. If a State-operated facial-recognition capability is being contemplated for private commercial use, that is no longer a public-safety program at all. It is a biometric identity infrastructure being built for reasons that have never been debated in the National Assembly, priced for the public, or subjected to a procurement record anyone outside Cabinet has seen.

THE REMEDY IS NOT OUTRAGE. IT IS A PAPER TRAIL.

Guyana does not litigate under the American Fourth Amendment, and importing that language wholesale into a Guyanese constitutional argument would be a category error. But the underlying principle translates without difficulty: a democratic government does not get to build an architecture of indiscriminate, searchable monitoring of its own population and then decline to say, in enforceable law, who controls it and under what limits. Necessity, proportionality, legality, transparency, and independent oversight are not American inventions. They are the baseline of any constitutional order that takes privacy, expression, and association seriously — all of which appear in Guyana’s own Constitution.

For any citizen who believes they have been recorded, matched, or flagged, the practical route runs through preservation before it runs through protest. Surveillance systems overwrite footage on short cycles. A letter to the Commissioner of Police, the responsible ministry, and any identified contractor — demanding preservation of footage, search logs, match records, and the underlying vendor contract, before requesting access to one’s own data — is not a symbolic gesture.

It is the only way to convert a system designed to be unaccountable into one that can, eventually, be made to answer in court, through judicial review, or through whatever mechanism the Data Protection Act supplies once it is finally switched on.

Until it is switched on — until there is a named agency, a published policy, an independent regulator, and a retention schedule a citizen can actually read — “Safe Country” is not a security policy.

It is a euphemism for a surveillance capability introduced by press statement, operated without a supervising law, and answerable to no one but the Vice President who announced it.

— The Board