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BARBADIAN Prime Minister Owen Arthur and Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo signed a treaty for joint cooperation in the overlap of their maritime Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) in London on December 2, 2003 and a motion to conclude and enforce this treaty is expected to be moved in the Guyanese parliament by Foreign Affairs Minister Rudy Insanally. This was confirmed yesterday by Director-General of Guyana's Foreign Affairs Ministry, Elizabeth Harper, in a Stabroek News report. She claimed there was no subterfuge in the London signing and it was only “a case of convenience” for both leaders who were in London at that time to meet with British PM Tony Blair ahead of that month's Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in Nigeria.

The existence of the treaty was first revealed on Tuesday, when the Barbadian and Guyanese governments said the treaty was concluded three months ago and “they were in the final stages of ratification”. Both governments declined to give the location of the treaty's signing, the identities of the signatories and claimed the treaty was not harmful to the maritime rights of any third state under international law and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The signing of the Barbados-Guyana EEZ Treaty is being viewed with suspicion given the former's current maritime boundary dispute with TT. Barbados claimed a 1990 TT-Venezuela Maritime Delimitation Boundary Treaty was harmful to its maritime interests but subsequently admitted that maritime energy reserves (not fishing) was at the heart of its dispute with TT and referred the matter to UNCLOS. Suggestions of a joint Barbados-Guyana alliance to access regional maritime energy reserves were heightened this week when Guyana invoked Article 287 of UNCLOS to settle a maritime border dispute with Suriname.

Last week, Jagdeo held talks with Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in Georgetown and access to petroleum supplies were prominent in those talks. Prime Minister Patrick Manning said TT is prepared to go before UNCLOS, has mobilised its security forces to protect its territorial waters if necessary and the TT-Venezuela Treaty cannot be repudiated without causing a major diplomatic row between this country and Latin America. Barbados has reportedly written letters to several energy companies operating in local waters, telling them those waters are in dispute. However the Canadian and US governments, the British and Foreign Commonwealth Office, US Central Intelligence Agency and the American Chamber of Commerce of TT stated that activity in the local energy sector has not been affected by current state of affairs between TT and Barbados.