More accident victims, families should sue for compensation – Nandlall

…says law already provides for harsh penalties against reckless drivers

By Jarryl Bryan

While the Government has made efforts on its end to reduce road fatalities, Attorney General (AG) Anil Nandlall, SC, has urged persons who are victims of road accidents and reckless driving to make use of available laws and bring lawsuits against the perpetrators, noting that this may be the catalyst needed to bring about real change.
Laws that cater for such actions include Section 12 of the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, Chapter 6:02, which establishes liability for damages suffered by applicants, such as in the case of an accident. According to the AG at his end of year press conference on Saturday, these laws are not being utilised enough.
“The law already provides for relatives of the deceased or, if the person survived, for that victim of a motor vehicle collision to sue for compensation. Lawyers have been deemed experts in this area of law. It’s called running down cases,” Nandlall explained.
“The late senior counsel Dereck Jagan was known for those types of cases. But people gotta do it more often. People gotta sue for compensation. And when people begin to lose their houses and so on, then perhaps (they) will think differently.”

While a common complaint in the past has been the sloth of the court system, Nandlall dispelled this, noting that cases are moving more quickly through the courts than ever before as a result of the backlog being significantly reduced.
“The good thing about the civil proceedings process now is that there is great alacrity now in the way cases are being heard and determined, at least in the High court. So, you don’t have to wait years for your case to be heard and determined. A case can be heard and determined now, within two years.”
“It used to take 10 years before. But we have worked assiduously to reduce the backlog, at least in the High Court. The system is working with the new rules, the number of new Judges, the E-Filing system. I think we’ve made substantial progress in bringing great dispatch to litigation in our justice system,” Nandlall further explained.
In response to the alarmingly high rate of fatal accidents, previous amendments to the Road Traffic Act had also been passed which created a new offence, motor manslaughter; and introduced harsher penalties for offences such as driving under the influence and dangerous driving.

The Government has also been rolling out its e-ticketing system along certain sections of the country’s roadways. For instance, the e-ticketing system was rolled out in 2022 along the Mandela to Eccles highway. And on its first day, the system recorded approximately 1,500 traffic violations.
The new approach replaces the manual ticketing method utilising paper tickets and blank paper, and it records the offending motorist through the application. It is anticipated that this will promote more road discipline, encourage drivers to obey traffic laws, and reduce the frequency of accidents caused by reckless driving.
Nandlall has consistently been vocal that cultural change is also required for the system to work. He had previously noted, “A large part of it has to do with the users of the road. The mentality must change … It requires an attitudinal change and that must come from the people, the users of the road.”
In 2024, Guyana had witnessed a decline in both fatal accidents and resultant deaths, according to data released by the Guyana Police Force (GPF) that spanned between January 1 and May 14, 2024, when there were 78 reported fatal accidents and incidents. This had marked a decrease from the 84 incidents recorded during the same period in 2023.
Correspondingly, the number of fatalities resulting from these accidents has also decreased, with 91 fatalities reported during that timeframe in 2024 compared to 95 in 2023. And data from January 1 to November 2, 2024 had showed an overall 30 per cent decrease in road fatalities, which went from 145 last year during the corresponding period to 102.
That being said, however, the GPF had recorded a 20 per cent increase in fatal accidents involving motor trucks/lorries for the period January 1 to August 26, 2024. The latest stats on overall road deaths for this year, as of November 18, 2024, had been 117 deaths from 104 fatal accidents.