By Dr. Emanuel Quashie. Updated 12:06 p.m., Monday, December 4, 2023, Atlantic Standard Time (GMT-4).
On December 3, 2023, Venezuelans voted in a referendum on “the rights” over a potentially oil-rich territory in dispute with its neighbor Guyana. The results show that Venezuelans are overwhelmingly in favor of claiming the disputed oil-rich territory long controlled by neighboring Guyana, with more than 95% approved establishing a new state in Essequibo, according to officials.
On December 1, 2023, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) told the Latin American country to “refrain from taking any action which would modify that situation that currently prevails” in the Essequibo region that makes up some two-thirds of Guyana.
To understand this case, one must go back to the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute over the boundary with British Guiana that was settled by arbitration in 1899:
“A treaty of arbitration entitled the ‘Treaty between Great Britain and the United States of Venezuela Respecting the Settlement of the Boundary between the Colony of British Guiana and the United States of Venezuela’ (hereinafter the “Washington Treaty”) was signed in Washington on 2 February 1897. The arbitral tribunal established under the Washington Treaty rendered its Award on 3 October 1899. That Award granted the entire mouth of the Orinoco River and the land on either side to Venezuela; it granted to the United Kingdom the land to the east extending to the Essequibo River. The following year, a joint Anglo-Venezuelan commission was charged with demarcating the boundary established by the 1899 Award. The commission carried out that task between November 1900 and June 1904. On 10 January 1905, after the boundary had been demarcated, the British and Venezuelan commissioners produced an official boundary map and signed an agreement accepting, inter alia, that the co-ordinates of the points listed were correct.”
However, the matter was reopened in 1962 when Venezuela submitted a memorandum on August 21, 1962, in which it claimed that she was forced to accept a Treaty of Arbitration whose terms were to her disadvantage. Venezuela cited unfavorable circumstances – such as having no judges from Venezuela being a member of the Tribunal while Great Britain was able to nominate two of its nationals to be among the judges, and the application of the principle of prescription for a period of 50 years, signified tacitly and in advance the loss to Venezuela of a substantial portion of territory illegally occupied by Britain.
The term “prescription” is one of the recognized modes of acquiring tittle to territory (roots of tittle). There are two kinds of prescriptions: Acquisitive and Extinctive. The former is the acquisition of a right by lapse of time while the latter is the extinction of a right by lapse of time. Oppenheim states that: “. . .in international practice, a State has been considered to be the lawful owner even of those parts of its territory of which originally it took possession wrongfully, provided that the possessor has been in undisturbed possession for so long as to create the general conviction that the present condition of things is in conformity with international order.”
There was also the Geneva Agreement (1966) known as the ” Agreement to resolve the controversy over the frontier between Venezuela and British Guiana. Signed at Geneva, on 17 February 1966″ that was originally signed by the Governments of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Venezuela; Guyana became a party to the agreement following its independence. The agreement was important as it established a Mixed Commission tasked with ” seeking satisfactory solutions for the settlement of the border controversy,” as well as “outlining procedures in case the commission should not arrive at a full agreement”.
For case examples: see Falkland Islands case involving the United Kingdom and Argentina and the Frontier Land case involving Netherlands and Belgium.
Sources: BBC (2023). Essequibo: Venezuelans back claim to Guyana-controlled oil region, URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-67610200; International Court of Justice (2023). Summary of the Judgment of 6 April 2023. URL: https://www.icj-cij.org/node/202654; Joseph, C. L. (1971). The Venezuela-Guyana Boundary Arbitration of 1899: An Appraisal: Part II. caribbean studies, 10(4), 35-74.; Bautista, L. B. (2010). The legal status of the Philippine Treaty Limits in international law. Aegean Review of the Law of the Sea and Maritime Law, 1, 111-139; Sherman, C. P. (1911). Acquisitive Prescription. Its Existing World-Wide Uniformity. The Yale Law Journal, 21(2), 147-156.; Blum, Y.Z. (1965). Prescription in International Law. In: Historic Titles in International Law. Springer, Dordrecht
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