The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Guyana has satisfied all requirements for the indication of provisional measures regarding Venezuela’s December 3 consultative referendum regarding its claim to the oil-rich Essequibo County of Guyana.
Consequently, the court made the following order: “Pending a final decision in the case, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela shall refrain from taking any action which would modify the situation that currently prevails in the territory in dispute whereby the Cooperative Republic of Guyana administers and exercises control over that area.”
Both Venezuela and Guyana were ordered to refrain from any action that might aggravate or extend the dispute before the court or make it more difficult to resolve. The World Court’s orders were unanimous and were read by its President Judge Joan Donoghue.
Guyana had requested that the top court of the United Nations impose temporary restrictions that would cause some of the referendum’s questions to be removed because it views the vote as an “existential threat” that would enable Venezuela to annex Essequibo.
Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has already declared that nothing—not even the court—would prevent her nation from proceeding with the referendum as is. The proposed referendum proposes giving Venezuelan citizenship to the residents of an annexed Essequibo.
The ICJ declared in April of this year that it possesses jurisdiction to determine the border controversy between the two South American neighbours. However, Venezuela does not recognise the court’s jurisdiction. In the major case, however, a final decision might not come for years.
Venezuela maintains that the border with Guyana, a former colony of The Netherlands and the United Kingdom (UK), was fraudulently imposed by the British, which it has denounced as a “land grabber.” Guyana, on the other hand, maintains that the line was determined on October 3, 1899 by an arbitration panel (Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899).
The Anglo-Venezuelan Arbitral Tribunal met in Paris, France, and on October 3, 1899 — 122 years ago — gave its award defining the border between Venezuela and then-British Guiana.
After abiding by the 1899 Arbitral Award for over half a century, Venezuela in 1962 claimed that the Essequibo area of Guyana belonged inside its borders. The debate has heated up after ExxonMobil found oil in Essequibo in 2015.
Because of this, Guyana launched a World Court case against Venezuela in 2018, to confirm that the border was established in an arbitration between the then-colony of British Guiana and Venezuela in 1899.
Within the framework of the 1966 Geneva Agreement between the two countries, the Secretary-General conducted Good Offices processes from 1990 to 2017 to find a solution to the border controversy.
On January 30, 2018, then Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, following a careful analysis of developments in 2017, chose the ICJ as the means to be used for the solution of the controversy.
The Essequibo accounts for almost two-thirds of Guyana’s territory, with around 125,000 of the country’s 800,000 inhabitants living there.
In the substantive case, Guyana seeks, among other things, to obtain from the ICJ a final and binding judgement that the 1899 Arbitral Award, which established the location of the land boundary between then-British Guiana and Venezuela, remains valid and binding, and a declaration that Essequibo belongs to Guyana.
