GOVERNMENT will remain in office and Cabinet meetings will continue until elections are held and the opposition’s People Progressive Party (PPP) can offer its views but the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) has already ruled.

This is according to Minister of Public Security, Khemraj Ramjattan during an interview on Friday on INSIGHT a radio programme hosted on VOG 102.5FM where he discussed various topics.

According to the PPP in a press statement “the APNU+AFC Coalition Government is currently illegal and Cabinet should have already resigned, consistent with Article 106 (6) of the Constitution and the recent ruling of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ). How then, is Cabinet meeting and making decisions?”

However, Minister Ramjattan said Cabinet meetings will continue until elections are held. “I think the Attorney General has made every attempt to clarify it but it seems to have been in the mind of the opposition supporters that this is what is to be done,” Ramjattan noted.
Quoting the constitution of Guyana, Minister Ramjattan stated “Article 106 (6) states that the Cabinet including the President shall resign if the government is defeated in a no-confidence motion, but the 106 (7) goes on to say, notwithstanding its defeat, a government shall remain in office until the holding of elections within three months or such longer periods as the National Assembly by a two-thirds majority shall vote on.” He explained that the CCJ ruling on the consequential orders makes this point, “in mandating that the government remains in office, notwithstanding its defeat and the resignation of the President and the Cabinet, Article 106 envisages that the tenure in office of the cabinet including the President after the governments defeat is on a different footing from that which existed prior to the vote of no-confidence.”

In offering an interpretation, Ramjattan said the President and Cabinet remains enacted but they are all on a different footing, which is on an interim or a caretaker status.
In such a status, Ramjattan said that Cabinet is still held and the President continues in his capacity until elections. “We still have to run the country, not Bharrat Jagdeo and Irfaan Ali will run the country, who then will run the country if we have to completely resign, but who does President Granger tender his resignation to, and the article written in the term as it was stating, that you shall resign until such time that the next President is sworn in,” Ramjattan noted.

He continued: “So the President is intact, Cabinet is intact, and the CCJ made it quite clear, but the intactness is under a new footing and status.”

The public security minister explained that if there is a national emergency or a sea defence breach Cabinet must meet and decide on the way forward and the amount to spend. “There is a doctrine in law that states that government must not be in a vacuum, you cannot have a void in governance and what it means then is that the President and Cabinet must be in existence,” he said.

Meanwhile, Ramjattan said that Parliament has not been dissolved or prorogued and as such Parliament can still be convened. He said that the next sitting of Parliament can be to seek a two-thirds majority support the extension of the life of the government. However, the PPP has repeatedly stated that it would not lend its 32 seats for the extension of the life of the governing APNU+AFC coalition because elections ought to have been held by March 21. A number of court challenges had been mounted all the way up to the Trinidad-headquartered regional appeal court.