The Attorney General Chambers has filed a summons to strike out the 2025 election petition made by the Forward Guyana Movement (FGM) – a newly formed political party that contested the September 1 polls.

Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall said the summons was filed on a number of grounds including that FGM did not obtain leave of the High Court to file the petition as is required by Article 163 of the Constitution of Guyana.

“…and if you don’t apply and obtain leave, the entire proceedings is a nullity,” he noted.

“We are also contending that they didn’t name all the parties, they didn’t serve the petition properly and within the time required for that to be done, the petition itself is not in the prescribed form, that other statutory documents that are required to support a petition of that type are not in their prescribed form or have not been filed,” the Attorney General added.

Noting that elections petition law is very “unique and peculiar”, Nandlall contended that “any procedural error is normally fatal”.

Prior to the September 1 elections, FGM – a party founded by former APNU Member of Parliament Amanza Walton-Desir – filed legal proceedings against GECOM after the party was excluded from the ballot in Regions Seven, Eight, and Nine – regions where the party did not submit the required lists of candidates to contest. FGM was only approved by GECOM to contest seven of the 10 regions.

In his August 29 ruling, acting Chief Justice Navindra Singh noted that GECOM’s decision to exclude the party from the ballots in the three regions was consistent with constitutional principles that ensure the ballot access reflects parties contesting within specific constituencies. In dismissing the case, the Chief Justice said the applicant, Crystal Fisher, failed to prove her claims of discrimination, describing the assertion as “malicious”.

This decision was then appealed at the Court of Appeal, where it was unanimously rejected.
Acting Chancellor Justice Roxane George declared in her October 10 decision that the case had no merit, reiterating that GECOM acted lawfully in excluding the party from the ballot in the three regions. Moreover, the Chief Justice noted that the case was improperly before the court; that is, it did not arise from an election petition, and as such, the court had no jurisdiction to entertain it.

Dissatisfied with the Appeal Court’s judgement, the FGM has filed leave to appeal to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) – Guyana’s final appellate court, and that matter comes up for arguments on December 10.

Now, the party has filed an election petition. Filed in the High Court on October 14 in the name of Randolph Critchlow, the election petition challenges the validity of the September 1 elections, claiming that Guyana’s electoral laws and GECOM’s enforcement of those laws violated citizens’ constitutional right to participate freely, fairly, and fully at any and every level of the electoral process across the country.

Nandlall reminded that the two election petitions challenging the 2020 polls that were filed by the PNC/APNU+AFC were both dismissed on a number of grounds including procedural errors.

According to him, FGM’s election petition “is ten times worse”.

Nandlall previously indicated that when this matter is thrown out by the court, he will not only file an application for costs from the litigant but also from the lawyer leading the case.

The High Court will set a date for the election petition hearing.

Costs 

Meanwhile, Nandlall has written FGM, reminding the party of two court-ordered costs totalling $4 million which are required to be paid by Friday, November 14.

These costs were awarded by the courts after FGM lost its ‘ballot exclusion’ case that was filed prior to the September 1 elections.

Nandlall said decisive steps will be taken to recover the sums if FGM fails to comply with the payment order.