As a part of the release owner responsibility, only release owners should have merge rights on the release branch that they manage. Request that for the just created release-3.12 branch, this be restricted to the following people, - jthottan - srangana (I think you need github IDs instead of these mail IDs, if so let me know) Further, in case approvals are needed, @amye and @vbellur are CC'ed to this bug.
For future reference, this only requires email address associated with Gerrit (no Github ID needed). Approval is only a problem when there's a non-maintainer given access. Jiffin is now a maintainer. This is now done. Please let me know if there are problems