Police to benefit from British weapons training
Stabroek News
March 25, 2004
The Office of the President and the British Government have signed an agreement for weapons training for members of the Guyana Police Force from April this year.
Head of the Presidential Secretariat Dr Roger Luncheon made the announcement yesterday during his weekly post-Cabinet briefing held at the Office of the President.
He said that the training is part of the current development of the Guyana Police Force and predates the establishment of the Disciplined Forces Commission. Luncheon said the training will include crowd control methods in addition to how firearms should be issued to ranks, used, and accounted for.
The British government is also to supply weapons it considers suitable for the needs of the Guyana Police Force.
At a briefing earlier this year, Dr Luncheon had said that delays in the procurement of the weapons were unavoidable. He said: "Most of [the delays] relate to the procurement by agencies external to Europe and a process that involves making provision for attending to human rights and civil rights."
He said that small arms, as they are called, are made available and exported to developing countries under European Human Rights legislation, after the submission of information about the practice of human rights. He had said it appeared that the difficulties which surfaced might have been related to conforming to European guidelines for the export of these weapons.
In January this year, he said those conditions were not universal and therefore efforts were being made to acquire those arms and similar arms from sources that do not present that type of challenge.