MINISTER of Citizenship, Winston Felix has refuted what he described as “dangerous and false allegations” made by Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, who accused the administration of engaging in people smuggling.
Jagdeo, a former President was quoted in the August 1, 2017 edition of the Guyana Times accusing the Government of engaging in “people smuggling”. Minister Felix clarified that neither Haitians nor any other groups are being allowed into the country illegally; noting that these allegations are spurious. “There is no smuggling of people. We have not found any evidence of people smuggling…We do not have any people smuggling ring,” Felix is quoted in a Ministry of the Presidency statement as saying.
Guyana only recently received high praise from the United States for its fight against human trafficking.
Minister Felix explained that a number of foreign nationals come to Guyana on a daily basis, including, but not limited to, Chinese, Cubans, Brazilians and Haitians. With regard to the Haitians, he explained that a few months ago, two groups of Haitians came into the country; one group came in with all the requisite documentation and went about their business and there have been no reports of smuggling since. However, the second group appeared to have provided two different sets of information to the police and the immigration officers at Timehri with regard to their intended place of residence during their stay in the country.

“The police stopped them on their way to Georgetown and queried their presence in Guyana… What the police did discover is that a number of people who came on that trip stated one address on the disembarkation card and by the time they were on their way to the City, they gave a different address to the police,” the Minister explained.
He noted, however, that this is not unusual, since very often people would have last-minute changes to their plans and as such, having verified that all of their other documentation was in order, they were allowed to proceed. Additionally, there were a few issues regarding the documentation for some Haitian children because they were written in French. However, those were rectified after they were translated into English.
The Opposition Leader, who was reportedly speaking at a political rally last Sunday, also said that the country is being used as an in-transit hub for Haitians to travel to French Guiana illegally. This too, was denied by the Minister, who explained that Haitians have been travelling to Guyana to Suriname and then to French Guiana for decades. “This has been happening as far back at 1981-1982. Nothing is strange about this. Even when the Opposition Leader was President, Haitians were passing through here because it is the normal route for them to travel,” he said.
Responding to Mr. Jagdeo’s malicious and patently false claims about the issuance of false birth certificates, Minister Felix said that the Department of Citizenship is in the business of issuing legitimate documents based solely on records of birth at the General Register Office. Moreover, the birth certificate features have been improved with the intention of guarding against forgery.

Back in June the US Department of State announced that Guyana had climbed to Tier 1 in its Trafficking in Persons (TIP), ranking, which signifies that this country has fully met the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards. Guyana’s latest rank was at Tier 2. With Guyana putting into practise the recommendations listed in the 2016 report, the 2017 report highlighted that the government has made key achievements during the 11 months, thus resulting in its upgrade.
These achievements include approving the 2017-2018 national action plan for combating TIP; increasing the number of investigations, prosecutions, and convictions; and identifying and assisting more victims for the second year in a row. The Ministry of Social Protection’s Anti-Trafficking Unit (ATU) added three new officers responsible for planning and executing the unit’s site visits and victim-extraction exercises. The government’s inter-ministerial taskforce coordinated a number of successful police operations, which resulted in a number of investigations, prosecutions and convictions.
Since last year, more stringent penalties were enacted for the traffickers. These ranged from three years to life imprisonment and were commensurate with those prescribed for other serious offences such as rape. The ATU, in coordination with the Guyana Police Force also developed identification procedures that field officers used informally during the reporting period, pending their formal review and approval from the taskforce. These procedures allowed for the identification of 98 trafficking victims in 2016 (80 for sex-trafficking and 18 for labour trafficking), compared with 56 in 2015. The government signed a MOU with an anti-trafficking NGO during the previous reporting period and committed public funding to the NGO-run shelter for the provision of enhanced psycho-social services to adult female trafficking victims referred by the government.