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McEwan and Others v. Attorney General of Guyana (C.C.J.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2019

Salvatore Caserta
Salvatore Caserta*
Affiliation:
Salvatore Caserta is a postdoctoral fellow at iCourts, the Centre of Excellence for International Courts of the Faculty of Law of the University of Copenhagen (PhD University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Law, LLM UC California, Berkeley Law School).
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Extract

On November 13, 2018, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) decided on an appeal coming from Guyana in the case McEwan and Others v. Attorney General of Guyana. With this decision, the CCJ declared unconstitutional Section 153(1)(xlvii) of the Summary Jurisdiction (Offences) Act of the Laws of Guyana, which made it a crime for a man to dress in female attire or for a woman to dress in male attire, in a public place, for an improper purpose. In the case, the CCJ also limited the extent to which the colonial “savings clause” present in the constitutions of the Commonwealth Caribbean countries limits the Court's judicial review powers.

Type
International Legal Documents
Information
International Legal Materials , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 247 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by The American Society of International Law 

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References

ENDNOTES

1 McEwan and Others v. Attorney General of Guyana, [2018] CCJ 30 (AJ) (Nov. 13, 2018) [hereinafter McEwan].

2 The savings clause of the Constitution of Guyana is to be found at Article 152; it states that nothing contained in or done under the authority of any pre-independence written law shall be held in contravention of the human rights protected by the Constitution.

3 See McEwan, supra note 1, at 36–38. This view was also confirmed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Watson v. R, (2004) 64 WIR [46] per Lord Hope.

4 McEwan, supra note 1, at 39.

5 Id. at 41.

6 Id. at 42.

7 Id. at 43.

8 Id. at 44.

9 Id. at 45.

10 Id. at 60.

11 Guy. Const. art. 149(1)(a).

12 Guy. Const. art. 149D(1).

13 McEwan, supra note 1, at 66.

14 Id. at 72.

15 Id. at 79, 80.

16 Id. at 85.

17 Attorney General of Barbados v. Joseph and Boyce, [2006] CCJ 3 (AJ) (Nov. 8, 2006).

18 Shanique Myrie v. State of Barbados, [2013] CCJ 1 (OJ) (Oct. 15, 2013).

19 The Maya Leaders Alliance et al. v. the Attorney General of Belize, [2015] CCJ 15 (AJ) (Oct. 30, 2015).

20 Tomlinson v. Belize & Tomlinson v. Trinidad and Tobago, [2016] CCJ 1 (OJ) (June 10, 2016).

21 Gregory August and Alwin Gabb v. The Queen, [2018] CCJ 7 (AJ) (Mar. 29, 2018). For a general account on these developments, see Salvatore Caserta, The Contribution of the Caribbean Court of Justice to the Development of Human and Fundamental Rights, 1 H.R. L. Rev. 18 (2018).