The Vacuum Where Vetting Should Be

 The Vacuum Where Vetting Should Be

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Former President Donald Ramotar wants the third-country deportee agreement made public. He has called it, in terms that will not please the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an attempt to re-colonize Latin America and the Caribbean. Strip away the rhetoric and what remains is a narrower, harder question the government has spent six weeks declining to answer: on what legal basis, and by what named authority, were the six people who arrived on September 4 actually screened?      

Guyana is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. There is no national asylum law. There is no statute defining who qualifies for protection, what a fear-of-persecution claim looks like in a Guyanese proceeding, or which institution has jurisdiction to hear one. When the Government’s September 5 statement invoked a “right to seek international protection,” it invoked a right that exists nowhere in Guyana’s own codified law. It borrowed the vocabulary of a framework the country never adopted.

This is not a technicality. It is the whole of the problem.

A vetting claim requires three things to be checkable: a standard, a process, and a name. Minister Persaud has offered the first, informally; non-criminal, “highly skilled” — in a January interview, months before the framework existed in any public form. No government statement since has named the second. No official document, briefing, or press release has named the third. Not Immigration. Not the Guyana Police Force. Not a joint mechanism with the Department of Homeland Security. Six weeks after arrival, the public does not know who looked at these files, against what checklist, or whether anyone did.

Ramotar’s call for disclosure is not a partisan gesture. It is the only available mechanism left for establishing whether any standard was applied at all — because no domestic legal standard exists independently of whatever sits inside that undisclosed diplomatic note.

The United States side of this arrangement fares no better on examination. On September 18, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s standard third-country removal procedure; the guidance under which these transfers are generally carried out — fails to guarantee migrants effective notice or a meaningful opportunity to raise a fear-of-persecution claim before removal. This was not a finding about one case. It was a class-wide ruling about the process itself, brought and decided as a challenge to DHS’s guidance rather than to any single removal. Courts do not typically adjudicate the individual paperwork of thousands of migrants one file at a time; they rule on the policy that governs all of them. The reasonable inference — not proof of any individual case, but a sound inference about a standardized bureaucratic process — is that the deficiency the court identified was not confined to the plaintiffs in that courtroom.

Put the two halves together and the picture is not ambiguous. On the sending side, a process the courts have now found procedurally deficient. On the receiving side, no legislation, no named vettor, no disclosed criteria, and no parliamentary record.

Two governments, each capable of pointing to the other’s silence as sufficient reassurance, and neither required to produce anything in writing.

This newsroom has documented the pattern before: framework announced by press release, never tabled in the National Assembly, no Hansard record, no ministry willing to speak to specifics. What is different about Ramotar’s intervention is that it reframes disclosure as a matter of self-determination rather than only accountability — the question of whether a small state can set its own terms for who crosses its border, or whether it simply processes what a larger power sends.

Whatever one makes of that framing, the underlying demand is not extraordinary. It is the minimum a country owes itself before absorbing people it has never screened, under a law it has never written, through a process no official will name.

Publish the agreement. Name the vetting authority. Table the instrument in Parliament. Until one of those three things happens, “vetted” is not a fact about these arrivals. It is a word the government has asked the country to accept on faith, in the continued absence of anything to check it against.

— The Board