Guyana on Thursday sought relief from the UN’s highest court after Venezuela said it would hold elections in the oil-rich Essequibo border region that both neighbors lay claim to.
Venezuela goes to the polls on May 25 to elect new governors of states, in which it has included Essequibo — a region that has been administered by Guyana for over a century.
This comes after 95 percent of voters in a non-binding referendum in December 2023 said they approved of Venezuela’s territorial claim to the region.
In March last year, the parliament in Caracas approved a bill to make Essequibo Venezuela’s 24th state. Rejected as invalid by Georgetown and other nations, it was nevertheless signed into law by Maduro.
On Thursday, Guyana said it had filed a request with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague for provisional measures after learning of Venezuela’s “plans to hold elections in Guyana’s Essequibo region, which is an integral part of Guyana’s national territory.”
It wants the court to order Venezuela “to refrain from any acts within or affecting its sovereign territory, including the Essequibo region” which makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s territory and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens.
Guyana, a small English-speaking former British and Dutch colony, insists Essequibo’s frontiers were determined by an arbitration panel in 1899.
But Venezuela claims the Essequibo River to the region’s east forms a natural border recognized as far back as 1777.
The long-running squabble was revived in 2015 after US energy giant ExxonMobil discovered huge crude reserves in Essequibo and reached fever pitch in 2023 when Georgetown started auctioning off oil blocks in the region.
The find gave Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world.
In December 2023, the ICJ granted an earlier request by Guyana for provisional measures, ordering Venezuela to refrain from any further action regarding the territory.
Plans to hold elections in the region “flagrantly violates this order,” Guyana’s foreign ministry said in a statement Thursday.
It urged the court to convene a hearing as soon as possible.
In the latest diplomatic incident, the United States on Saturday denounced what it said where Venezuelan naval vessels “threatening” an ExxonMobil unit in maritime territory claimed by Guyana.
