President (E): Guyana acted in bad faith in transferring the dispute over the Essequibo to the ICJ

Published at: 11/05/2026 11:38 AM

The President in charge of the Republic, Delcy Rodríguez, from the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, denounced the abandonment of good faith in Guyana's actions, by unilaterally transferring the dispute over the Essequibo territory to a different legal body than that established in the Geneva Agreement.

“Guyana unilaterally chose to transfer the controversy from the scope of the negotiation of the judicial decision in an open violation of the agreed legal framework,” said the president (e), while denouncing that “this change was not innocent. It coincides with the appearance in 2015 of the oil discovery classified as world-famous; Guyana, as a result, stopped acting in good faith and maintained a silent intention to escape the compliance of Geneva Agreement”.

In this regard, he specified that Guyana “abandoned the logic of a mutually acceptable solution and adopted an illegal strategy of judicialization aimed at obtaining through this Court and without the consent of Venezuela what it could not achieve within the framework of the Geneva Agreement: to validate a fraudulent award.

The president maintained that negotiation was replaced by litigation, “good offices by pressure and political consensus, by unilateral action that perpetuates and exacerbates the controversy.” In addition, he reiterated that Venezuela does not accept that “this shift driven by Guyana redefines the nature of the controversy” and rejected the use of the ICJ “as an instrument to consolidate this change in violation of the Geneva Agreement and international legality (...) This Court was not created to replace the will of States, but to act within the limits defined by that will, and those limits, in this case, are clearly established in the Geneva Agreement.

Finally, he reaffirmed the Venezuelan right not to renounce the territory of Guiana Essequiba, “Venezuela will not renounce its history or its legitimate rights, rights expressly recognized and preserved in the Geneva Agreement, simply because Guyana now intends to unilaterally and opportunistically redefine the controversy.”

Mazo News Team