Revised Laws of Guyana, updated law reports almost ready

This year will be a significant year for the administration of justice, Attorney General and Legal Affairs Minister Anil Nandlall, SC, has predicted.
Nandlall has said the PPP/C Government is committed to investing in the Judiciary in order to ensure the effective administration of justice.
There will be some extremely significant laws passed in 2024, he recently said at the commencement of the 2024 Law Year and the launch of the Judiciary’s first-ever Strategic Plan. And because the Government’s legislative agenda is so vast, Nandlall just briefly discussed those that he believed would fundamentally affect the way justice is administered.
For example, he said that, by the first quarter of this year, the revision and consolidation of the Laws of Guyana from 2012 to December 31, 2022 will be finished.
“It ought to have been concluded on or before the 31st of December 2023, but because of the volume of work, the contractor has asked for an extension. That extension has been granted, and hopefully, long before the conclusion of the first quarter of 2024, we will be launching both soft copies and hard copies of the revised laws of Guyana,” the Attorney General has said.
He had previously said the nation’s laws must be accurate, complete, and up-to-date in order to reflect the changing legal environment. He had noted that by doing this, the national goal of updating and modernising Guyana’s legislative framework would be realised.

The revision exercise is being conducted through a collaborative effort of the Attorney General’s Chambers, the Ministry of Legal Affairs, and the Improved Access to Justice in the Caribbean (IMPACT Justice) Project, and is being executed by the Regional Revision Centre in Anguilla.
The law reports from 2007 to 2020 are already a work in progress, he said.
“That also was supposed to have been delivered by the end of December; but, again, we added over 200 additional cases from the time the contract was awarded. We had to make variations to the contract to accommodate the large influx, belatedly done, of cases that would be reported. I have been assured that before the first quarters of 2024, those law reports will be ready for launch.”
He said that as these programmes are meant to be self-financing, support from the Bar in particular, as well as from other interested organisations, would be necessary. In order to achieve this, he said, Ronald Burch-Smith, President of the Bar Association, had given him the assurance that the law reports would be sold.
Nandlall continued, “I initially ordered 750,000 hard copies of each report. I have since cut that down drastically, and we are now at 250,000. So, the reports are there, and we are hoping that they will be purchased. The money will go back into an account that will be used for the next phase of the exercise; that is, 2020 and beyond.”
Court rulings on significant cases are recorded in a nation’s legal reports. In order to provide a precedent for similar cases in the future, these cases are documented and stored in volumes. Volume-based compilation of these cases guarantees accessibility and promotes uniformity and convenience of the legal procedure. (G1)