A Court Divided Against Itself

ACCOUNTABILITY WATCH · REGIONAL JUDICIARY

A Court

Five of six CCJ judges accuse President Justice Winston Anderson of “dictatorial” rule and interference in case outcomes — and Guyana has more riding on this court than almost any other member state

THE 592 GUARDIAN  |  EDITORIAL BOARD  |  AUGUST,2026

THE Caribbean Court of Justice was built to be the region’s answer to a colonial anxiety: that Caribbean people should no longer have to sail their final appeals to London to receive justice. It was, in its founding promise, a court by the region, for the region — accountable to no imperial crown, answerable instead to the collective integrity of its own bench. That promise is now the subject of an internal reckoning its architects surely never anticipated.

Internal correspondence obtained and published by the Trinidad Express’s Sunday edition shows that five of the CCJ’s six sitting judges have formally challenged the leadership of its president, Justice Winston Anderson, accusing him of governing in a manner one judge bluntly called “dictatorial.”

The allegations are not about robes or bench jackets, whatever the paper trail’s origin point. They go to the marrow of judicial independence: panel composition, pressure on colleagues to align with predetermined outcomes, and a president who, by his own reported admission, told his colleagues early in his tenure that he did not see himself as “running a democracy.”

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

The dispute surfaced publicly through a dispute over a proposed judicial dress code — an administrative matter that, under ordinary governance, would merit little more than a committee memo. Instead, it became the occasion for judges to air grievances that had evidently been accumulating for months.

I have never seen before the level of dictatorship in the administration of a judiciary that I have witnessed at the CCJ in recent months.— Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji, in correspondence to fellow CCJ judges

Justice Peter Jamadar of Trinidad and Tobago went further, alleging in a detailed e-mail that he had experienced “an attempt to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner” in relation to the Mohamed vs. MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter — a case with direct Guyanese relevance, given that the applicants in the underlying dispute are Guyanese nationals. Jamadar also cited concerns about “unreasonable timelines” imposed on judges reviewing a consolidated draft decision in the Jeremy Enriquez and Anand Ramlogan matter.

Justice Eboe-Osuji’s account of Barrow v. Caricom is, if anything, more serious still: he alleges that Anderson attempted, without prior consultation, to “single-handedly override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions that guided how decisions are rendered when judges disagreed” — and that in the Mohamed matter, Anderson informed colleagues he intended to announce the court’s decision at a time and in a manner a “clear majority” had told him was inappropriate.

Justice Arif Bulkan — the CCJ’s Guyana-born judge — was among those who pressed for proper internal consultation before any policy went to the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission, and separately raised concerns about how a rigid dress code might disadvantage religious minorities on the bench. Justice Maureen Rajnauth-Lee invoked the lengthy, consultative process used under Anderson’s predecessor, Justice Adrian Saunders, as the standard against which the current president’s conduct should be measured — and found it wanting.

WHY THIS IS GUYANA’S FIGHT TOO

It would be a mistake for Guyanese readers to treat this as a Trinidad-datelined curiosity, distant from home. Guyana is not a peripheral member of the CCJ system — it is one of the court’s most exposed constituents.

Guyana accesses the CCJ in both of its jurisdictions. As a signatory to the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, Guyana falls under the court’s Original Jurisdiction as a matter of treaty obligation — non-optional, structural. And Guyana is one of only five CARICOM states (alongside Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and Saint Lucia) that has gone further, replacing the London-based Privy Council with the CCJ as its final court of Appellate Jurisdiction.

When Guyanese litigants exhaust their domestic appeals — in constitutional matters, in criminal appeals, in commercial disputes — the CCJ is the last word. There is no jurisdiction above it to correct an error, and no further right of appeal if the court’s internal processes have been compromised.

That is precisely why Justice Jamadar’s warning deserves to be read in full by every Guyanese lawyer, judge, and civil society actor who has ever placed faith in this court: he described the risk as extending to “both our OJ and AJ jurisdictions, with implications for the jurisdictions that access this court for the delivery of justice services.”

That is not diplomatic language. That is a sitting judge, in writing, telling his colleagues that the confidence of an entire region’s justice-seeking public may be at stake.

The Mohamed extradition matter cited in Jamadar’s e-mail is not an abstraction for Guyana. It involves a Guyanese Leader of the Opposition and his father, contesting the validity of an Authority to Proceed — a case the CCJ dismissed on appeal on July 29, 2026.

If a judge with direct knowledge of that matter’s internal handling is on record alleging attempted interference in its outcome, Guyanese citizens are entitled to know whether the process that produced that judgment was sound, regardless of one’s view of the underlying merits.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY THE REGION IS OWED

What is notable — and to the credit of the five judges who signed their names to these concerns — is that this dissent did not stay silent for fear of institutional embarrassment.

Justice Eboe-Osuji explicitly called for the matter to be resolved internally “before things get out of hand,” before it became public.    It became public anyway, and the public is better for it.

The CCJ was conceived as a repudiation of unaccountable, distant authority. A regional court that cannot hold its own presidency accountable to the collegiate norms its judges swore to uphold does not escape that colonial anxiety — it reproduces it in a new form, homegrown and unexamined.

Guyana’s political class, its bar, and its civil society have a direct stake in demanding that the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission treat this matter with the seriousness it demands, transparently, and not as an internal personnel matter to be quietly managed.

This publication will continue to track this story and its implications for Guyanese litigants and for the region’s confidence in its own apex court.

The full internal correspondence, as obtained and published by the Trinidad Express (CCN Group), is available via the link accompanying this piece.— READ MORE:

https://1drv.ms/b/c/86ce3366cc1a852b/IQAHMCOQTsyfTI8Ibb6NNCliAZ_6LWfPy7WEq8WNHUkaCpo

— The Board