Oliver Jackman to replace Sir Alister as UN Good Officer
Oliver Jackman, the eminent Barbadian human rights jurist and diplomat, has been appointed to replace Sir Alister McIntyre as Good Officer in the border controversy between Guyana and Venezuela. Sir Alister is to step down as Good Officer next month having served in this position since 1991. Both governments and UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, were formally notified of Sir Alister's desire to demit the post when they met in New York last month. Jackman's appointment was only officially confirmed yesterday by the United Nations and accounted for his declining to comment when asked by Stabroek News on Wednesday whether he had been approached to take on the assignment. He told this newspaper yesterday by phone from his home in Barbados that he was informed by telephone earlier in the day by an official in the UN Secretary General's Office that the governments of Guyana and Venezuela had agreed to his appointment. Jackman said that he was extremely honoured to have been approved by the two governments to be the Good Officer in what he described as a very complicated issue. Jackman said too that he would now have to brief himself more thoroughly than he had been doing up to now. Part of this process, he said, would include meetings with the United Nations Secretary General and the Guyana and Venezuelan governments. Jackman, a judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to which he was elected in 1995 for a six-year term, is the first person to serve on both the Court and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of which he was president during his membership of that body. For his activities in the field of human rights, Jackman was decorated by the Venezuelan government in 1980 with the Order of Francisco de Miranda. The Cambridge University-educated Jackman also had a distinguished career in the Barbadian foreign service, having served at various times as Barbados's permanent representative to the United Nations, 1969-1971, Ambassador to the United States of America and to the Organisation of American States, 1977-1980, as well as Ambassador to the Court of Belgium and to the European Commission. A former journalist in print and radio, and a public information officer for a number of years, Jackman writes a weekly column for the Barbados Nation. A CANA report says too that he is also an occasional consultant to the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Caribbean Community on human rights and diplomatic training. 
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