标签： Guyana

In a public statement issued Wednesday from his current location in the United States, the senior head of Guyana’s top organized crime enforcement unit has strongly refuted unsubstantiated social media claims that he was taken into custody and interrogated by U.S. law enforcement officials during a recent entry into the country.

Deputy Police Commissioner Fazil Karimbaksh, who leads the Guyana Police Force’s Special Organized Crime Unit (SOCU), is moving forward with plans to pursue legal action against the individuals responsible for spreading the false allegations across social platforms. Currently on the ground in the U.S., Karimbaksh explained that his lawsuit will aim to compel a court order forcing the originators of the rumors to release any evidence they claim to have supporting the assertion that he was detained upon arrival last week.

Karimbaksh’s role at SOCU centers on leading high-stakes financial crime investigations, work that regularly involves close cross-border coordination with law enforcement partners across the Caribbean, North America and other international jurisdictions. This is not the first time rumors of U.S. law enforcement questioning of senior Guyanese police officials have circulated: the Guyanese government has previously pushed back on and downplayed similar reports naming multiple high-ranking police figures as subjects of U.S. interrogations.

The unconfirmed allegations spread widely across social media earlier this month, prompting Karimbaksh’s first public on-the-record denial of the claims amid growing public attention to the rumor.

Guyana’s ambitious national constitutional review process is poised to open public input this weekend, Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall confirmed in an announcement on his weekly social media program “Issues In The News” Tuesday evening. The process, led by the Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC), will kick off with a six-month window for written public submissions, to be followed by in-person public consultations held across every region of the South American nation.

Under the framework outlined by Nandlall, the public can contribute recommendations via multiple channels: hand-delivered submissions to the CRC Secretariat office located on the Fifth Floor of the CRC building at 211 Camp and Lamaha Street in Georgetown, or emailed submissions sent to the official commission address gycrc2024@gmail.com. All submissions must include valid government-issued identification, Nandlall emphasized, ruling out anonymous input entirely. “This is serious business. If you want to make a contribution to such a nationally important process, then you must be able to say who you are and give us some form of ID, so that we can authenticate and verify who you are,” he explained in remarks Tuesday.

The public engagement initiative comes amid mounting national and international debate around key governance and electoral issues that have divided Guyana’s political landscape in recent years. Top among the contentious topics are calls to clarify citizenship rules for non-Commonwealth migrants and migrant workers, and debate over whether foreign residents including Commonwealth citizens should be granted voting rights in national elections. The country’s opposition has repeatedly pushed for constitutional amendments to mandate periodic fresh voter registration, a change intended to remove names of deceased people and emigrated citizens from electoral rolls, addressing long-running claims of inflated voter lists and electoral fraud.

Nandlall confirmed that electoral reform will be a core thematic priority for the review process, including potential changes to the composition of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), the process for selecting GECOM’s chairman, and the commission’s jurisdiction over national registration and electoral administration. For decades, international election observation bodies have repeatedly called for an overhaul of Guyana’s voter registration system and a restructuring of GECOM to expand its representative base and resolve persistent political deadlock that has delayed past electoral processes.

Beyond electoral changes, the CRC will consider a broad slate of additional reform priorities. These include strengthening legal protections for all fundamental rights and freedoms for Guyanese, upholding the specific rights of Indigenous peoples and children, eliminating all forms of systemic discrimination, guaranteeing minority representation in national decision-making, and expanding safeguards for economic, social and cultural rights for all citizens. Other key focus areas include measures to preserve and reinforce the independence of the judiciary, enhance accountability for public funds, and strengthen integrity standards for public office. The commission will also review the functioning of the National Assembly, exploring reforms to boost its capacity and effectiveness as a deliberative lawmaking body, and assess the local government system to identify improvements to its delivery and governance capacity.

Notably, Nandlall stressed that the listed thematic areas are not exhaustive. Members of the public are welcome to submit recommendations on any constitutional matter that is not explicitly outlined in the public call, including proposals to add new provisions not currently included in the national charter. The attorney general issued a broad appeal for full participation from all segments of Guyanese society, including individuals, community groups, civil society organizations and public and private institutions.

“This is a process of tremendous public importance. It will impact the type of amendments that we will see in the Constitution when the process concludes. Any responsible person, I think, would want to become part of this process,” Nandlall said, framing the reform process as a historic opportunity for Guyanese to shape the future of their national governance framework.

On Tuesday, June 30, 2026, Enrique Monize, Commissioner of the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission (GLSC), announced a multi-pronged initiative to clear long-standing backlogs in land applications while rolling out modern geospatial and digital land management technologies across the South American nation. The announcement, delivered at the GLSC’s 25th anniversary awards ceremony, marks a key milestone in the government’s push to build a more accessible, transparent land administration system aligned with national development goals.

As part of the backlog clearance effort, the GLSC is currently conducting boundary surveys on thousands of acres of underutilized public land across nine of Guyana’s 10 administrative regions, excluding the densely populated Demerara-Mahaica (Region Four). Once surveyed, these parcels are transferred directly to the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA), the government body responsible for housing development and land allocation. Monize told attendees that the agency targets to prepare an additional 8,000 acres of land for CH&PA this year alone, a move designed to eliminate the agency’s housing application backlog in all regions outside Region Four.

The GLSC’s work complements ongoing progress at CH&PA, which launched a digital single window system for land and construction applications in June 2024. Just days before Monize’s announcement, CH&PA officials reported that the new platform has already cut the backlog of residential land applications by 21%, while seeing a 1% rise in submitted non-residential applications. Speaking at the recently concluded 2026 Building Expo, CH&PA Research Officer Kimberly Cosbert shared detailed data on the system’s uptake: between its launch and June 2026, the platform has received 8,513 total applications, 64.3% for residential projects and 35.7% for non-residential developments. Of those submissions, 3,535 have been fully processed and closed, leaving 4,055 still in the review pipeline. “This shows actually that the system is being used and applications are being moved from one stage to the other,” Cosbert noted, highlighting that the digital overhaul is already streamlining administrative workflows.

To address backlogs within its own operations, the GLSC has deployed a mobile task force that conducts file audits across all of its regional offices, purging dormant records and processing long-unresolved applications. Monize reported that this targeted cleanup has already led to a “significant decline” in public complaints about delayed land services during community outreach events.

Alongside backlog reduction, the commission is cracking down on illegal encroachment on public state land. Monize cited a recent incident just one day prior, where an individual attempted to seize publicly owned land at the former Hog Stye toll station. In response, GLSC surveyors immediately demarcated the parcel to reserve it for a planned Public Works Ministry project to install vehicle weighing scales. “Government land has to be left to do government business. We cannot just give everything away,” Monize emphasized, reaffirming the agency’s commitment to protecting state land assets for public use.

Founded under Act No. 15 of 1999, with official operations launching on June 1, 2001, the GLSC is the successor to the 19th-century Crown Lands Department, later reorganized as the Department of Lands and Surveys under the Ministry of Agriculture. Today, the agency is advancing a series of long-term modernization projects beyond backlog clearance. It is currently updating national maps, with the revised map of the capital city of Georgetown already 90% complete, and new map sets for coastal and developed inland areas currently in production. The GLSC has also begun work on the first-ever updated regional land use plans for West Demerara-Essequibo Islands (Region Three) and Demerara-Mahaica (Region Four), two of the country’s most economically active regions, and will conduct a full review and update of the draft national land use plan.

Guyanese President Irfaan Ali laid out the government’s broader vision for land sector reform during the event, stating that the administration aims to build a modern, efficient, transparent, and citizen-centric land administration system. Ali articulated priorities including fully digitized, publicly accessible land records, data-driven decision-making based on accurate geospatial information, and expanded geographic information systems (GIS) infrastructure to support evidence-based planning and development nationwide. A core goal of the reform, he noted, is to strengthen tenure security for all land users, including individual citizens, smallholder farmers, private businesses, and local communities. “We want institutions that work seamlessly together in support of national development, and we want a system that balances economic growth with responsible stewardship of our land resources for future generations,” the president said.