By Marvin Cato | HGP Nightly News|
GEORGETOWN, GUYANA — A vital two-day capacity-building workshop was launched at the Police Officers’ Mess to foster deeper collaboration between police investigators and state prosecutors, marking the latest phase of an expansive regional criminal justice overhaul.
The intensive training seminar was hosted as a joint initiative between the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) and the Guyana Police Force (GPF). The exercise is funded and structurally supported by the Partnership of the Caribbean and the European Union on Justice (PACE) project—a collaborative, EU-backed program implemented via the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to modernize judicial systems across Guyana and seven other Caribbean territories. The overarching mandate of the PACE framework aims to significantly slash crippling court case backlogs, reduce pre-trial detention rates, and institute far-reaching digital reforms.
Delivering the opening address, Minister of Tourism, Industry and Commerce, Oneidge Walrond, emphasized that the joint initiative reflects the administration’s strategic, long-term commitment to building a modern, professional, and thoroughly accountable domestic justice sector.
Deputy Solicitor General Shoshanna Ali, speaking on behalf of Attorney General Mohabir Anil Nandlall, SC, underscored that the training targets the critical, baseline connection between initial scene investigations and final prosecutorial execution. Ali noted that one of the three primary pillars under the PACE justice project is the systematic empowerment of frontline actors within the legal landscape through targeted technical training.
In her address, the Deputy Solicitor General revealed that while the Attorney General’s Chambers have worked extensively with parliamentary stakeholders to bring cutting-edge criminal laws onto the books, the executive branch remains concerned that key statutory tools, such as the plea-bargaining mechanism, are not being utilized by local ranks as widely or effectively as intended.
To bridge this operational gap, Ali disclosed that a permanent, mandatory training program is currently being developed. Under this upcoming structural rollout, police officers will be required to undergo formal legal training at every stage of their advancement in rank. The curriculum will deal strictly with vital criminal legal matters, including:
- Constitutional provisions and protections
- Advanced criminal procedure
- Statutory interpretation and field application
- Binding judicial case law precedents
- Newly enacted legislative frameworks
The Attorney General has already held high-level consultations with the Acting Chancellor of the Judiciary, the DPP, senior police leadership, and international PACE officials, yielding a definitive consensus that a permanent academic policing model is necessary to fix current institutional deficiencies.
The PACE justice initiative has continuously scaled up its regional operations over the last quarter. Last April, the organization facilitated highly specialized advanced training in criminal trials and appellate procedures for High Court and Court of Appeal judges. Those judicial masterclasses were facilitated directly by Justice Paula-Mae Weekes, the former President of Trinidad and Tobago and former Judge of the Trinidadian Court of Appeal.
