A Giant in the Dock of Cowardice

JUDICIAL INTEGRITY  |  ACCOUNTABILITY

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A Giant in the Dock of Cowardice:

The Campaign to Recuse Justice Arif Bulkan and What It Reveals About Guyana

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The Editors  |  The 592 Guardian | June 2026

Before a single word is written about the grotesque campaign to drive Justice Arif Bulkan from the Caribbean Court of Justice, Guyana owes itself a moment of honest accounting. Not because the attacks warrant the dignity of a direct refutation—they do not—but because the contrast between what Dr. Bulkan has built and what his detractors have deployed is itself the story.

Justice Arif Bulkan is one of the most decorated Caribbean legal scholars of his generation. His academic formation spans the University of the West Indies and the University of London, where he pursued advanced study in international human rights law—a field that demands not partisan loyalty, but unflinching commitment to the dignity of persons across all political circumstances. He returned to the region not as a man seeking comfort or convenience, but as a practitioner who chose to engage with its structural imperfections from the inside.

His scholarship is not decorative. He has written with distinction on gender-based discrimination, sexual orientation and the law, constitutional rights in the Caribbean, and the jurisprudential inheritance of colonialism in regional legal systems. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to the intellectual architecture that underpins how Caribbean courts reason about fundamental rights today. He served as a lecturer at UWI’s Faculty of Law, where he shaped the minds of a generation of Caribbean lawyers—including, one suspects, some who now argue matters before the very court on which he sits.

 In 2025, Justice Bulkan was appointed a judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice—the regional apex court that serves as the final court of appeal for member states and the original jurisdiction court for matters arising under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. His appointment was the culmination of a career defined by intellectual rigour, ethical consistency, and a record of service to the law as a civilising force. It was, as the columnist rightly observed, a moment in which all Guyanese—regardless of ethnicity, party affiliation, or political persuasion—might have paused to acknowledge that one of their own had ascended to the peak of regional jurisprudence.

Justice Bulkan’s appointment to the CCJ was a moment in which all Guyanese might have paused to acknowledge that one of their own had ascended to the peak of regional jurisprudence. Instead, a campaign was assembled to remove him.

Instead, a campaign was assembled to remove him.

The argument advanced by Mr. Quincy Anderson in the Stabroek News—and amplified by State media and at least one outlet with demonstrable proximity to the ruling People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration—is not a legal argument. It does not identify a ruling in which Justice Bulkan departed from established law. It does not point to a recusal application that was improperly refused. It does not cite a pattern of conduct, a conflict of interest declared or undeclared, or a single credible instance of bias in the record.

What it does instead is invoke the political activities of Justice Bulkan’s siblings.

This is not jurisprudence. This is familial guilt by association, and it would not survive ten minutes before any competent tribunal in the Commonwealth. The legal standard for judicial recusal—rooted in cases ranging from R v Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, ex parte Pinochet Ugarte (No. 2) to Porter v Magill in the United Kingdom, and affirmed across Caribbean jurisdictions—is whether a fair-minded and properly informed observer would conclude there is a real possibility of bias. That observer is not a partisan actor with a litigation interest. That observer is not a newspaper columnist with political sympathies. That observer is a hypothetical person who knows the law, understands judicial independence, and is not susceptible to manufactured outrage.

By that standard, the Anderson submission fails entirely. No informed observer—understanding that judges are independent actors with no legal responsibility for their relatives’ political engagements—would conclude that Justice Bulkan is incapable of adjudicating fairly a matter in which the Government of Guyana is a party. The suggestion to the contrary conflates constitutional governance with partisan administration, and it conflates judicial independence with familial political sterility.

No judge in Guyana—or anywhere in the Commonwealth—could safely adjudicate politically sensitive matters if the political activities of relatives constituted grounds for disqualification. The campaign against Justice Bulkan, if accepted, would paralyse the entire regional bench.

If accepted as a standard, the implications for Caribbean jurisprudence would be catastrophic. Guyana is a small, politically saturated society. Virtually every professional family in Georgetown has members distributed across the political spectrum. If a judge’s siblings’ civic or party engagements constitute disqualifying associations, then no judge drawn from that society can ever hear a politically significant matter. The result would be a judiciary engineered not for impartiality, but for partisan convenience—recused into irrelevance whenever the party in power finds the bench’s composition inconvenient.

 

More troubling than the letter itself is the institutional silence that surrounded it.

The call for Justice Bulkan’s recusal originated in State media—a medium that operates under conditions of editorial influence, if not outright direction, from the governing administration. It was subsequently amplified by at least one additional outlet with documented proximity to the PPP/C. In a well-functioning democracy with a genuinely independent press, such a charge against a sitting apex judge would have triggered immediate, vigorous responses: from the Bar Association, from legal scholars, from the editorial boards of independent newspapers, from the Attorney General’s chambers, and from the President himself.

None of that happened.

The Guyana Bar Association—the professional body whose entire institutional purpose is to uphold the integrity of the legal system and protect the administration of justice from political manipulation—issued no statement. The press, with the exception of two columnists and a letters-to-the-editor section, treated the matter as routine. The Attorney General, Anil Nandlall SC—a man of genuine legal capability who knows perfectly well that the Anderson argument is without merit—made no public pronouncement in defence of the institution or the jurist under attack.

This silence is not neutral. In the context of a State-adjacent campaign targeting a judge whose rulings may affect Government interests, silence from the Government’s chief law officer is a form of complicity. It allows the attack to circulate, to gain legitimacy through repetition, and to do its corrosive work on public confidence without the authority of the State intervening to correct the record.

This silence is not neutral. In the context of a State-adjacent campaign targeting a judge whose rulings may affect Government interests, silence from the Government’s chief law officer is a form of complicity. It allows the attack to circulate, to gain legitimacy through repetition, and to do its corrosive work on public confidence without the authority of the State intervening to correct the record.

The columnist cited in these pages noted with precision that Attorney General Nandlall could clothe himself with honour by coming out sharply against this effort. He has not done so. The consequence of that inaction is that the State, which has every reason to wish Justice Bulkan sidelined from matters affecting its interests, has allowed a third party to do the work of disqualification while maintaining plausible deniability.

This is how institutional cowardice operates in Guyana: not through open orders, but through strategic silence.

The Guyana Bar Association issued no statement. The Attorney General made no public pronouncement. The press was largely silent. In a small society where everyone knew what was happening, the institutional silence was not neutrality — it was complicity.

Justice Bulkan has served on the CCJ bench since 2017. In that time, he has adjudicated matters of political sensitivity involving Caribbean governments, including matters touching on constitutional rights, treaty obligations, and governance. His family ties—including the political engagements of his siblings—have existed throughout that period.

The question that neither Mr. Anderson nor the outlets amplifying his argument have chosen to answer is: why now?

Ethical concerns about judicial impartiality do not ripen on a politically convenient schedule. If Justice Bulkan’s family relationships constituted a genuine ground for recusal, that ground existed in the several years he would have occupied the bench. It exists in matters that have already been decided. If it is a real concern, it implicates the validity of every ruling in which those relationships existed and were not disclosed as a disqualifying factor.

The fact that this argument has emerged now—at a moment when matters affecting the Guyanese government’s interests are before or approaching the CCJ—invites only one conclusion: this is not an ethics argument. It is a litigation strategy dressed in ethical language. It is an attempt to shape the composition of the bench in advance of rulings that the government or its associates fear may not go their way.

That strategy is not unprecedented in Caribbean legal history. It is, however, among the more brazen applications of it in the modern era of the CCJ, and it deserves to be named plainly as what it is.

Let us be precise about what is actually being proposed in the Anderson letter and the campaign it represents.

The proposal is that a judge of Caribbean apex standing—a man whose scholarly record on human rights is internationally recognised, whose career was built in service to the law rather than to any political formation, and against whom no credible allegation of bias has ever been sustained—should be removed from cases because his relatives engage in political life.

This is a new low.

Guyana has, in recent years, positioned itself on the world stage as a country of emerging consequence: a petrostate with democratic institutions, a rights-respecting legal system, and a commitment to the rule of law that makes it a credible partner for foreign investment and international engagement. The Government has traded heavily on these credentials. The President invokes them. The Foreign Minister deploys them. The oil companies cite them.

Against that backdrop, the campaign against Justice Bulkan is not merely an attack on one man. It is an attack on the credibility of every institutional claim the Government of Guyana has made to the international community. You cannot simultaneously claim world-class governance standards and orchestrate—or permit—a campaign to recuse one of your country’s finest jurists from the regional bench using arguments that would embarrass a first-year law student.

The two positions are incompatible. And the world is watching.

You cannot simultaneously claim world-class governance standards and permit a campaign to recuse one of your country’s finest jurists using arguments that would embarrass a first-year law student. The two positions are incompatible.

Guyana has expelled its most promising—that observation has been made across generations, by writers from Wilson Harris to the columnist quoted in these pages. The pattern repeats: a figure of genuine distinction rises, and the society that produced them finds a way to make the achievement feel unsafe. Justice Bulkan chose to return, chose to serve the region from its highest bench, and is now subjected to a campaign that would insult the dignity of a man of far lesser stature.

That Guyana is capable of producing a Justice Arif Bulkan is a source of pride. That it is also capable of producing a Quincy Anderson letter—and an institutional silence willing to let it stand—is a source of shame.

We return to an observation that warrants its own reckoning: the Guyana Bar Association said nothing.

The Bar exists not merely to regulate the admission and discipline of attorneys-at-law. Its broader mandate, recognised in bar associations across the Commonwealth, includes the protection of the administration of justice and the independence of the judiciary. When a sitting judge of the regional apex court is subjected to a public campaign for recusal grounded in legally untenable arguments, the Bar has an institutional responsibility to respond—not as a partisan defender of the judge, but as a defender of the legal standards that the campaign is systematically misrepresenting.

Its silence here is a dereliction.

Equally notable is the failure of the media. The Guyana Times published the Anderson letter; it is not clear that it subjected the letter to the editorial scrutiny its legal claims required before doing so. The State-owned and State-adjacent outlets amplified it without the counterpoint that professional journalism demands. The response—two columns and some letters—came not from institutions, but from individual writers acting on their own conscience.

That is not a functioning ecosystem of accountability journalism. That is a society in which institutional courage has been quietly evacuated, leaving only the courage of individuals to fill the space. The 592 Guardian notes this not with contempt for those individuals—their contributions were serious and principled—but with alarm at what their solitude reveals about the broader institutional landscape.

 

 

In his 1960 first inaugural, John F. Kennedy—himself the son of a man whose biography included rum-running, stock manipulation, and worse—asked not what his country could do for him, but what he could do for it. The columnist invoked that parallel pointedly and correctly.

Justice Arif Bulkan was not obligated to remain in the Caribbean. His scholarly credentials would have opened doors in London, Toronto, New York, or any number of jurisdictions where Caribbean legal talent is welcomed and compensated accordingly.

He chose instead to remain, to teach, to publish, and ultimately to serve on the bench from which regional law is made.

The attacks on his integrity are not merely unfair. They are, in a precise sense, ungrateful—ungrateful to a man who gave his professional life to a region that has now, through some of its most powerful voices, chosen to question whether he can be trusted to do the job he has been doing for nearly a decade without complaint.

A fair-minded and properly informed observer—the legal standard, it is worth repeating—would see in Justice Bulkan’s record nothing but cause for confidence: a jurist who has adjudicated across the spectrum of Caribbean legal life, who has written with scholarly distinction on the rights of the most vulnerable, and who has conducted himself throughout with the ethical consistency that judicial life demands.

That observer would see in the campaign against him something quite different: the architecture of a political project, assembled from conjecture, amplified by complicit media, and sustained by the institutional silence of a Bar and an Attorney General who know better.     

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The Caribbean Court of Justice’s integrity is not preserved by entertaining arguments of this nature. It is preserved by the adherence of judges like Arif Bulkan to standards that the campaign against him has failed to impeach. It is preserved, too, by the willingness of an independent press to say plainly what institutions have been too timid to say: that this attack is without legal merit, without evidentiary foundation, and without moral standing.

Justice Bulkan’s reputation was built over decades of disciplined, ethical, intellectually serious service. It will not be undone by a letter that does not withstand even the most elementary scrutiny—provided the country’s institutions find the courage to say so.

Guyana produced him. That is something. The question now is whether Guyana will protect what it produced—or continue, in its characteristic fashion, to consume it.

Editorial Note:

This editorial draws on two published columns responding to the recusal campaign against Justice Bulkan, as well as the original letter by Mr. Quincy Anderson published in the Guyana Chronicle. No response was issued by the Attorney General’s chambers, the Guyana Bar Association, or the State Media at the time of writing. The 592 Guardian editorial board stands by the legal and institutional analysis presented here and invites any correction on the factual record.