KINGSTOWN, St Vincent (CMC) –St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves on Wednesday said there will still be tensions after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) delivers a judgment in the decades-old border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela.
“Whichever way they go, you’re still going to have tensions,” Gonsalves said.
Gonsalves, who serves as an interlocutor, based on the Argyle Agreement signed between the two countries here in December 2023, said that the ICJ may deliver its judgment sometime later this year or early next year.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m not too up-to-speed on the progress of the litigation, and I know the ICJ will take some time to write the judgment and so forth because they have had hearings already,” Gonsalves said as he addressed the latest dispute between the two countries on his weekly radio programme.
Last weekend, Guyana alerted the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the international community to the presence of a Venezuelan naval vessel that remained near its oil assets for about four hours.
Since then, the United States, France, CARICOM, the Commonwealth as well as the Organization of American States (OAS) have all called on Venezuela to not engage in further provocation by threatening ExxonMobil’s Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) vessel.
But Venezuela has dismissed comments made by Guyana’s President, Irfaan Ali, saying it “categorically repudiates the baseless remarks” of the country’s leader, whom it said “lies brazenly when he claims that units of the Bolivarian Navy of Venezuela are violating the maritime territory of Guyana”.
Caracas said that Ali is “hiding the fact that those waters do not form part of Guyanese territory since it is a maritime zone pending delimitation in accordance with international law”.
Guyana and Venezuela are before the ICJ concerning the Arbitral Award of October 3, 1899 with the ICJ warning Caracas against the “annexation” of Essequibo, an oil-rich region that makes up about two-thirds of Guyana and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens.
The case, which was filed by Guyana in March 2018, seeks the court’s decision on the validity of the Arbitral Award which finally determined the land boundary between the two countries. The court has already ruled that it has jurisdiction over the controversy and will decide the issue on the merits of the case.
