Business and Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram
On 14 October, Charles Ramson Sr., Commissioner of Information, answered two citizens. A year earlier, Danuta Radzik and Elizabeth Deane Hughes, two outstanding members of civil society, had asked him for environmental permits and hazardous waste records connected with the costly and poorly executed Gas to Energy project and offshore oil operations. He never replied. After the High Court ruled against him in my case, they resent their request to Ramson.
His reply, which opens “Dear Comrade,” deserves to be read by President Ali, who holds portfolio responsibility for the Access to Information Act. Ramson announced that he would deal with their letter “in truly Ramsonesque fashion.” Only a man suffering from acute insecurity, or gross self-adulation, turns his surname into an adjective. And what is the Ramsonesque fashion? A year of silence, a lecture in place of a decision, and a sneer at the judge who found against him.
He dismissed the ruling as “a decision of a puisne Judge,” and advised the two women to await “final judicial directions” from “Judges of exceptional, superior vintage” on “Guyana’s neoteric Access to Information Act 2011.” The Act is fifteen years old. If it seems “neoteric” to Ramson, it is because he has wasted thirteen years of it.
He closed with satisfaction that the women had accorded him “my official Title,” unlike the practice “tolerated by that Trial Judge in [my] Case.” A year’s silence to two citizens troubles Ramson less than the judge’s failure to insist that I call him “Justice.”
Contrast Ramson’s “superior vintage” with his letterhead: his name and post-nominals; Notary Public, Justice of the Peace and Commissioner of Oaths to Affidavits; Commissioner of Information; and the address, the Office of the President. A man who craves his “official Title” cannot distinguish his private practice from a public office. He conducts the State’s business on stationery that advertises his own, under the President’s portfolio.
Readers may recall that in March 2025 I asked Ramson for the taxes paid by the Government on behalf of the ExxonMobil-led consortium, their treatment in the public accounts, and the annual reports the Act requires. He sent me first to the Ministry of Natural Resources. I went. He still decided nothing.
On 28 September Justice Nicola Pierre held all three requests valid and deemed them refused by Ramson (para 139) who unlawfully imposed a precondition “which Parliament did not impose”. Reflecting on Ramson’s integrity, the judge noted that he had denied receiving letters he had himself answered. She called his affidavit “casuistry” (para 38), “particularly ironic and lamentable” in a case about access to information (para 14).
She dismissed his claim that a request for his own office’s records was an “absurdity” because he cannot “self-oversee” (paras 53 and 128). The absurdity was his. She ordered him to decide within sixty days which expires on 27 November.
President Ali has neither the courage nor the inclination to confront what the Court’s findings and Ramson’s own letters make plain: he is unfit for the office.
It would be a mistake to make this about Ramson alone. The Court found his office is not independent of Government (paras 65 and 68), and the Gazette of 31 October 2025 shows the President kept the portfolio for himself, along with the Environmental Protection Agency, which holds most of the documents Ms. Radzik and Ms. Hughes want.
As Minister, Ali has duties of his own. No section 44 report on the Act has ever been laid in the National Assembly, and the Court found no evidence of the Part III statements either (para 89).
Guyana was the first to ratify the Escazú Agreement on environmental information, and President Ali wore it as a badge of honour. In 2025 citizens took Guyana’s information blackout to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. His Administration’s chair was empty. A badge of dishonour and cowardice.
Nothing stops Ali from saying the Court must be obeyed, laying the missing reports, or asking Parliament to amend the Act. Silence is a choice, and Ali has made it. What kind of inverted society are we living in when a man paid millions of public dollars to release information withholds it, and citizens must go to court to get what the law already promises?
On 15 July 2025, the President assured me that the Act, and my requests under it, would be addressed after the elections. Fifteen months on, his Commissioner sneers at the Court and he says nothing. Which side is he on: the Court or his Commissioner? Was he ever serious? He was not. It was hypocrisy.
I will not let up. Ramson has until 27 November to obey the Court, and I shall shortly begin proceedings against the Government of Guyana for every citizen’s constitutional right to information. The President can still make them unnecessary. He need only do what he promised, what the law requires and what the Court has made plain.
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