Election Petitions · Explainer

The Guyana precedent hanging over the Friday citizenship case

A single Canadian passport once helped bring down a Guyanese government and cost four ministers their seats. As Kingstown waits on its own dual-citizenship ruling, that case is back in the conversation, though it settles less than either side might hope.

By Lance Davis · Kingstown · 31 July 2026

As St Vincent and the Grenadines waits for the High Court to rule on whether Prime Minister Godwin Friday and Foreign Affairs Minister Dwight Fitzgerald Bramble were qualified to be elected, lawyers and commentators keep returning to a case from Guyana. It is the region’s most cited authority on parliamentarians who hold another country’s citizenship, and the parallel is close. It is also more complicated than a headline allows, because the Guyanese courts found such a member disqualified and yet declined to unwind what he had already done.

What happened in Guyana

On 21 December 2018, an opposition no-confidence motion against the APNU+AFC coalition government passed by a single vote, 33 to 32. The vote that carried it came from a government backbencher, Charrandass Persaud, who held Canadian citizenship alongside his Guyanese nationality. His status was challenged almost at once, on the argument that a dual citizen was never qualified to sit, and that the motion should therefore fall.

The case moved through all three levels of the court system. In the High Court, then acting Chief Justice Roxane George held that Persaud was indeed disqualified by his allegiance to a foreign power, yet ruled that the no-confidence motion still stood and that his election could only be undone through a proper elections petition. The Court of Appeal then reversed her on the arithmetic, holding that 34 votes, an absolute majority of the 65 seats, were needed to carry the motion. In June 2019 the Caribbean Court of Justice, Guyana’s final court, settled it: 33 was the correct majority, the motion was validly passed, and the disqualification of a dual citizen, while real, was “of limited scope”, producing no automatic consequences unless someone petitioned the High Court to declare the seat vacant. Past proceedings and the member’s own votes were left untouched.

The fallout

The wider cost landed on the government benches. Following the High Court and Court of Appeal rulings, four coalition ministers who held foreign citizenship resigned their seats in April 2019: Foreign Affairs Minister Carl Greenidge and Public Service Minister Rupert Roopnaraine, both British citizens, Business Minister Dominic Gaskin, also British, and Minister of State Joseph Harmon, an American citizen. Most signalled they would renounce their foreign citizenship and return; Gaskin, born in the United Kingdom, argued he had never pledged foreign allegiance and declined to give up the citizenship of his birth. Opposition members were not exempt from the problem either, with several also holding second passports.

Why it matters here

The Vincentian petitions rest on Section 26(1)(a) of the Constitution, which disqualifies anyone who is, “by virtue of his own act”, under an acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state. Guyana’s Article 155(1)(a) is not merely similar, it carries almost the same words. That near-identical language is exactly why the Guyana rulings are pressed into service in Kingstown, and why the petitioners lean on them: there, a court held that Canadian citizenship, acquired by an adult’s own act, placed a member outside the qualification the Constitution demands.

The disqualification was real, the Guyanese court held, but its consequences were not automatic. The effect of the Caribbean Court of Justice ruling, June 2019

There is a limit to how far the comparison travels. St Vincent and the Grenadines has not joined the Caribbean Court of Justice as its final court of appeal; it keeps the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. That means the Guyana decisions, including the CCJ’s, are persuasive authority only, not binding on Justice Gertel Thom. A Vincentian court must read the Vincentian Constitution on its own terms, against its own history and the evidence led by the parties.

And the two cases are not perfectly aligned. In Guyana, citizenship of Canada, itself a Commonwealth country, was still treated as triggering the bar. The respondents in Kingstown will argue that the Vincentian Constitution is different in a way that matters, because it contains an explicit provision recognising Commonwealth citizens as qualified to stand, and Canada is a Commonwealth state. Whether that provision rescues a candidate who also took an oath and carried a foreign passport is one of the central questions Justice Thom must decide, and it is a question the Guyana courts did not have to answer in the same form.

What the Guyana experience really shows is how much can turn on a clause that most voters never think about, and how unevenly it can land. It cost a government its majority and four ministers their seats, yet left a disputed vote standing. Kingstown’s answer will be written on the Vincentian Constitution alone. But when Justice Thom’s ruling comes, it will be read across the Commonwealth Caribbean, and set beside Guyana’s, as the next entry in a debate the region keeps returning to.

Details of the Guyana proceedings, the 2019 ministerial resignations and the citizenships involved are drawn from contemporaneous reporting by Stabroek News, Kaieteur News, the Guyana Chronicle, News Room and Demerara Waves, and from the Caribbean Court of Justice’s June 2019 judgment. The wording of Section 26(1)(a) is taken from the Constitution of St Vincent and the Grenadines. The status of the Vincentian petitions is as previously reported by this outlet.