Letter: A response to the legal opinion on the Guatemalan claim to Belize

Dear Sir:

Attorney David Fine and editor Evan X Hyde, as a Belizean I commend you for writing this extremely powerful legal opinion on Belizean rights to our country. Also, Mr Hyde for publishing this needed article in his Amandala newspaper to educate our people on this ongoing never ending false claim Guatemala has been stating for centuries over our nation Belize.

I would like to see more Belizean legal scholars express their legal opinions on this issue like you but such is not the case.

This article gives many Belizeans like myself the confirmation that, without any doubt, Belize belongs to Belizeans. However, there are many Belizeans who are asking this question: if we are so convinced that this is true, then why go to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to reaffirm this fact?

Then there are others like myself, who believe that even if we go to the ICJ and become victorious, the Guatemalans will not cease and desist from engaging in their false claim against Belize, then why go? This is the reason why many Belizeans are skeptical about taking this dispute to the ICJ for a hearing.
Monday, March 20, 2017

Dear Editor,

The Honourable Foreign Minister was quoted in the media as saying this past week that Belize lacked “internationally recognized borders,” and that the Belizean people therefore are like “squatters”. If Mr. Elrington was quoted correctly, then I certainly have to understand him to have been speaking metaphorically.

The fact that Guatemala refuses to recognize Belize’s established borders does not render them any the less valid at law. The international community, speaking through the United Nations, recognized both the Sarstoon, and also the parallel of longitude passing north to south through Garbutt’s Falls, as Belize’s borders with Guatemala. The U.N. General Assembly passed successive annual resolutions in the years prior to independence calling for Belizean independence within just these borders.

As importantly, Belize acquired title under international law to all of the territory within its present internationally recognized borders no later than 1850. Well before the date at which sovereignty over Belize transferred from the Belizean people to the British Crown in 1862, it was Belize and Belize alone which manifested sovereign authority as far west as Garbutt’s Falls, and southward all the way to the Sarstoon.

The 1859 Treaty by its own terms recognized existing boundaries. Guatemala ceded no territory to Belize, for the simple reason that none of the lands in question ever were Guatemalan territory, either factually as shown through acts on the ground, or as a matter of international law.

Belize

Country in Central America
Belize is a nation on the eastern coast of Central America, with Caribbean Sea shorelines to the east and dense jungle to the west. Offshore, the massive Belize Barrier Reef, dotted with hundreds of low-lying islands called cayes, hosts rich marine life. Belize’s jungle areas are home to Mayan ruins like Caracol, renowned for its towering pyramid; lagoon-side Lamanai; and Altun Ha, just outside Belize City.
Capital: Belmopan
Currency: Belize dollar
Recognized languages: Spanish
Population: 359,287 (2015) World Bank
Plan a trip
Belize travel guide
26 h 47 min flight, from $1,318

Official language: English

As the Treaty was not one of cession, no substance can be attached to Guatemala’s argument that a British obligation to build a road or a railroad from the Caribbean to Guatemala City allowed Guatemala to renounce that treaty. There are several reasons for this, both factual and legal:

Guatemala actually got what it bargained for. Modern historical research shows that Guatemala’s primary interest when it sat down to negotiate the 1859 Treaty was to get British warships to suppress “Filibusterers” along the Caribbean coast. Guatemala in fact got just that.

Under principles of customary international law, even if Guatemala had not gotten what it actually had bargained for, Guatemala has no right at law to renounce a boundary treaty due to a later failure of consideration; that is, due to a later failure of Britain to build a road or a railroad to its capital. The International Court of Justice recognized and applied this legal principle in 1994, in its ruling in Territorial Dispute (Libyan Arab Jamahiriya/Chad).

Guatemala

Country in Central America
Guatemala, a Central American country south of Mexico, is home to volcanoes, rainforests and ancient Mayan sites. The capital, Guatemala City, features the stately National Palace of Culture and the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Antigua, west of the capital, contains preserved Spanish colonial buildings. Lake Atitlán, formed in a massive volcanic crater, is surrounded by coffee fields and villages.
Capital: Guatemala City
Capital and largest city: Guatemala City; 14°38′N 90°30′W / 14.633°N 90.500°W
Currency: Guatemalan quetzal
Population: 16.34 million (2015) World Bank
President: Jimmy Morales
Official language: Spanish


Even if that were not so, any objective reading of Belizean-Guatemalan diplomatic history shows the failure of the transportation link to materialize was as much the fault of Guatemala as of Britain.

The paramount right of a nation at international law, the right of self-determination, precludes Guatemala from lawfully asserting sovereignty over any portion of Belize.

Read here more - Belizean–Guatemalan territorial dispute


Over the nine colonial decades, from 1859 through to self-government in 1964, Belize (née British Honduras) consolidated its sovereignty over the entirety of its territory, as required under rules of international law. Throughout this entire period Guatemala exercised not a jot or tittle of actual authority within the lands it now claims. Had Guatemala once had any claims to Belizean territory cognizable at international law, it thus lost its legal right to assert such claims.

Belize’s rights at public international law to the entirety of its land territory may be disputed by its western neighbour. Countries, like people, are best off when their neighbours do not covet any of their possessions. However (to continue this analogy) the fact that one’s neighbour asserts a baseless challenge to one’s possessions does not make one’s ownership of each and every of these possessions any the less valid in law.

If I understand the Honourable Foreign Minister correctly, it certainly is best to put Guatemala’s claims to an end – however baseless they may be in international law. If an ICJ adjudication will serve this purpose, then that alone may be good reason to seek, in the proper manner, to have the International Court of Justice pronounce upon the issue. The Foreign Minister also rightly points out that the sea frontier off Belize’s coast needs to be delimited. But the suggestion that without such an ICJ decision the people of Belize are like squatters and are without good title under international law to their own nation must be understood as an attempt to speak metaphorically.

David Fine
Attorney At Law
Olympia, Washington