Two Processes, One Target

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Two Processes, One Target

Peeping Tom is right about the law and wrong about the facts

By: Editor  ·  August 2026

Kaieteur News’s Peeping Tom column of August 1 sets out to correct what it calls a “strange argument” now circulating about the MV Barima case — that a Commission of Inquiry and a criminal prosecution cannot sensibly proceed at the same time.

On the law, the column is largely correct. The Commissions of Inquiry Act does not bar concurrent proceedings. It protects a witness before a Commission against being compelled to incriminate himself; it does not grant immunity, and it does not force prosecutors to wait on a Commission’s findings before laying charges.

Peeping Tom’s account of South Korea’s Sewol disaster — arrests within days of the sinking, murder charges within a month, a disaster-causation inquiry that continued for years afterward without displacing the criminal process — is accurate as description.

What the column does not do is ask the only question that matters here: not whether parallel process is lawful in the abstract, but whether the sequence of events in this specific case shows the law being used to produce, in practice, the very outcome the self-incrimination safeguard was never meant to enable — the silencing of the men most likely to testify about who above them failed first.

“It begs the question: what is the position with the ministers with oversight responsibilities?” — Paul Slowe, former Assistant Commissioner of Police

THE TIMELINE THE COLUMN SKIPS

The record settles the sequence. President Irfaan Ali named the five-member Commission of Inquiry on Sunday, July 26 — Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith of Belize as chair, alongside commissioners from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Poland. At that announcement, the President’s office confirmed the legal instruments required to formally establish the Commission were still being finalised.

Two days later, on Tuesday, July 28, Captain Kevin Price, Chief Mate Rondell Roberts and Goods Superintendent Delon Granderson were jointly charged with 72 counts of murder and remanded to prison. The Commission itself was not sworn in until July 30 — two days after the men who might have testified before it were already behind bars, already indictable, and already entitled to say nothing.

Former Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Slowe asked the question publicly the same week, and it is worth recording exactly as he put it: “I thought that persons were identified to form a Commission of Inquiry to inquire into the MV Barima tragedy. But now I am reading that three men were this morning charged with murder and remanded to prison, in relation to the same MV Barima tragedy. It begs the question: what is the position with the ministers with oversight responsibilities?”

That is not a fringe or partisan objection. It is a former senior police officer naming, in real time, the exact sequencing problem this news-media  is raising now.

THE MECHANISM PEEPING TOM HANDS US

Peeping Tom’s own reasoning supplies the mechanism. The column is correct that the Act’s safeguard is protection against self-incrimination, not a pause on prosecution. But that protection only activates once a person faces charges — and it is prosecutors and police, not the Commission, who decide when those charges are laid. Charge a man before the Commission can hear from him, and the “protection” the column cites as evidence Parliament anticipated concurrent process becomes, in effect, a mechanism for producing silence at precisely the moment silence is most useful to whoever sits above the accused in the chain of command.

The Sewol comparison actually illustrates the difference rather than erasing it. South Korea’s arrests came within days, but its disaster-causation inquiry ran for years afterward, generating a long investigative record independent of what any charged crew member chose or declined to say early on. Guyana’s Commission, by contrast, had not yet taken a single day of evidence when the three men who operated and loaded the vessel were placed permanently outside its reach.

A MANDATE THAT REACHES ABOVE THE CREW

The Commission’s own terms of reference make plain what was foreclosed. President Ali’s mandate for the CoI explicitly directs it to assess “whether negligence, misconduct, dereliction of duty or institutional failures contributed to the disaster” — language that reaches beyond the vessel’s crew to the regulatory and ministerial chain responsible for oversight. Price, Roberts and Granderson were the men positioned to speak first-hand to loading practice, vessel condition, and whether instructions or pressures from above shaped decisions made that night.

Whatever they might have told the Commission about supervision, maintenance backlogs, or institutional pressure is now filtered through defence counsel and the risk of self-incrimination, in a case members of the legal fraternity are already questioning on its own terms — among them the puzzle of how Granderson, who was not aboard the vessel when it sank, is charged with murder at all, and what motive the prosecution proposes for a theory that would have required the captain and mate to accept their own deaths alongside their passengers’.

WHO THE TIMING SERVES

None of this requires believing the charges are fabricated, or that Price, Roberts and Granderson bear no responsibility.

It requires only asking who benefits from these three men, and no one above them, being the ones whose voices the Commission will not freely hear. Peeping Tom defends the architecture. This publication  is asking who built the timing.

The 592 Guardian renews its position that the Commission of Inquiry’s independence and reach cannot be assessed by its terms of reference alone.

It must be judged by whether the men and women positioned to name institutional failure are still free to do so. On the facts as they now stand, three of them are not.

— The Board