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Shalimar Ali-Hack
Title: Attorney at Law and Director of Public Prosecutions for Guyana
Biography: Mrs. Shalimar Ali-Hack has been an Attorney at Law for the past 25 years. Her entire practice has been in criminal law. She joined the Chambers of the Director of Public Prosecutions in October 1990, as a State Counsel, immediately after graduating from the Hugh Wooding Law School. She continued to work at the Chambers and was promoted to Senior State Counsel then Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions and Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions. With effect from 1st January 2005, she was appointed as the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Throughout her professional career as a State Lawyer, she has dealt with thousands of files. The articulate DPP’s accomplishments did not end at the numerous cases presented before the High Court as State Counsel. She also appeared in several summary matters in the Magistrates’ Court and they were primarily narcotics trials and preliminary inquiries for serious offenses such as Fraud and Murder.
She is the first lawyer to present a narcotics case that was tried before both Judge and Jury in Guyana and in that case the accused was convicted. This case was before the then Chief Justice Cecil Kennard and the appeal was dismissed by our Court of Appeal. Mrs. Ali-Hack was also the first DPP to institute a case under the Money Laundering (Prevention) Act no.1 of 2000. The DPP has also represented the state in several murder cases in the Appeal Court. Fraud cases can also be added to her slate as she made the state proud in several cases where the accused persons were lawyers. Mrs. Ali-Hack currently appears in the Appellate Courts.
Mrs. Shalimar Ali-Hack is the first female to be sworn in as the Director of Public prosecution. This augurs well for female lawyers at the bar.
As the DPP, her duties do not include just legal work but also include management of the office as well as of the budget; hence, as a DPP she does not only have to be legally capable but also be able to manage persons and the accounts.
Over the course of the years, Mrs. Ali-Hack has written several papers and made presentations at several fora. Some of them are the paper “Working with vulnerable witnesses” presented at the Magistrates Conference on “The Domestic Violence Act-Implementation” on May 17, 2003. She has presented written papers on the “Validity of Committals Part 1” at the Police Prosecutors Sessions in March 2005 and the “Validity of Committals Part II” at the Police Prosecutors Sessions in August 2005. Mrs. Ali-Hack also presented a written paper on “Violence Perpetrated Against Women and Children” at the National Consultation Forum on Stamp It Out held by the Minister of Human Services and Social Security in observance of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women held at the Convention Centre, Liliendaal in March 2008. She presented a written paper on “The New Sexual Offences Act” with senior police officers of the Guyana Police Force on August 7, 2010. Mrs. Ali-Hack presented a written paper to the NCLO in 2013 on “The role of the DPP in the Criminal Justice System”. She presented a written paper on “The Prevention and Fight Against Terrorism and its Financing” in 2012 at a United States-sponsored Anti-Terrorism Conference at the Grand Coastal Hotel. Mrs. Ali-Hack did a written paper on “Preventing Intimate Partner Homicide: Combining Criminal Justice, Medical and Contextual Data” in 2013 at the Convention Centre sponsored by the Ministry of Home Affairs. She also did a written paper to discuss the Confiscation of the Proceeds of Crime in 2013. Mrs. Ali-Hack did a written paper on “The Prosecution Strategy and the Guyanese Legal Framework for Proceeds of Crime Recovery” in November 2014 at a training for Proceeds of Crime hosted by the British High Commission and facilitated by the CCARP Office in Barbados.
In addition to the aforementioned Mrs. Ali-Hack made a presentation and was a panelist at the University of Guyana panel discussion sponsored by the Embassy of the United States of America.
Mrs. Ali-Hack is the Contact Person for Guyana on Criminal Law Issues on the Commonwealth Network of Contact Persons for Criminal Law Issues.
She is an independent member of the National Commission for Women; and formerly was a member of the Women and Gender Equality Commission.
Mrs. Ali-Hack was the Head of NACOSA (National Committee for Sisters Affairs-the Women’s Arm of the Central Islamic Organisation of Guyana) for the period March 1991 to January 2006.
Another one of her firsts is, she is deemed to be the first Muslim Attorney-at-Law in Guyana to dress Islamically since 1995 after her return from the Hajj. She considers religious freedom and peaceful coexistence between all religious groups in our country to be a great national achievement, of which all Guyanese must be proud and strive to maintain and protect. An example of this is her parents, her mother was born into a catholic family and her father was born into a Muslim family.
