Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez seen during a press conference after the signing of an agreement with Chevron Venezuela in Caracas in April – Copyright AFP Fadel ITANI<\/p>\n
Venezuela\u2019s acting president Delcy Rodriguez said Saturday she is traveling to The Hague to represent her country before the International Court of Justice in a dispute over the oil-rich Essequibo region.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has fallen to me to travel in the coming hours to defend our homeland,\u201d Rodriguez said in a televised speech, referring to the territory claimed by both Venezuela and neighboring Guyana, which currently administers it.<\/p>\n
It would be her first trip outside the Caribbean since assuming power following the capture of strongman Nicolas Maduro by US forces in January.<\/p>\n
The UN court has in recent days been hearing from representatives of Venezuela and Guyana over the centuries-old dispute that has at times threatened to spill over into military action. The hearings, which began on May 4, will conclude on Monday.<\/p>\n
The two countries have been wrangling over the region since the 1800s, with the conflict intensifying after ExxonMobil discovered massive offshore oil deposits a decade ago, giving Guyana the largest crude oil reserves per capita in the world.<\/p>\n
The Essequibo region comprises more than two-thirds of Guyana.<\/p>\n
Neighboring Venezuela, however, claims the territory, which\u00a0runs roughly along the western side of an eponymous river over an area of 160,000 square kilometres (62,000 square miles).<\/p>\n
ICJ judges have been asked to rule on the validity of the border established between the two countries in 1899 under British colonial rule.<\/p>\n
Venezuela argues that the border should be drawn in accordance with a later document from 1966 signed before Guyana gained its independence.<\/p>\n
It says that the Essequibo River, located much farther east than the current border, is the natural frontier, as it was in 1777 under Spanish colonial rule.<\/p>\n
Long under US sanctions, Rodriguez saw them lifted in April as part of a rapprochement with Washington, which saw Caracas grant US companies access to Venezuela\u2019s oil riches.<\/p>\n
People appearing before the ICJ, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, benefit from special legal protections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez seen during a press conference after the signing of an agreement with Chevron…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4731,7463,8401,42,7462],"class_list":{"0":"post-10093","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-hague","8":"tag-diplomacy","9":"tag-guyana","10":"tag-icj","11":"tag-the-hague","12":"tag-venezuela"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/netherlands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}