A Robe, a Ruling, and the Real Question at the CCJ

REGIONAL JUDICIARY · ANALYSIS

A Robe, a Ruling, and the Real Question at the CCJ

Behind the wardrobe dispute that removed Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji from the D’Almada panel sits an unresolved legal fight that reaches directly into Guyana’s own treaty rights — and a Court whose public response answered none of it.

On June 26, 2026, CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson removed Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji from the panel set to hear D’Almada v Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Caricom. No reason was given in the e-mail itself. The explanation that eventually surfaced — that Eboe-Osuji’s Nigerian formal attire was unsuited to a robed sitting — has not survived its own timeline. Eboe-Osuji sat, in the same robe-optional capacity, on the Robateau panel two days earlier. He was not removed from that one.

That inconsistency is the least of what this dispute exposes. Read alongside the correspondence Justice Eboe-Osuji and Justice Peter Jamadar put on record, the removal looks less like a dress-code enforcement action and more like a president reshaping a panel ahead of a ruling on a question he has said, in Eboe-Osuji’s account, he believes was wrongly decided by the CCJ’s full bench in 2009.

WHAT TCL V GUYANA ACTUALLY HELD

Guyana is not a bystander to this dispute — it is the precedent at stake. Trinidad Cement Limited and its Guyana subsidiary sued Guyana in 2009 after Georgetown unilaterally suspended the Common External Tariff on cement, citing flood recovery and Cricket World Cup stadium construction. The CCJ, sitting in its Original Jurisdiction over the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, ruled against Guyana: the suspension breached the Treaty, and Guyana could be held liable in damages, even though TCL could not ultimately prove loss because it had sold all the cement it could produce regardless.

A follow-on 2010 ruling found Guyana had not complied promptly with the Court’s order — Guyana’s own request for an extension was treated as an admission of non-compliance — though the Court declined to hold Guyana’s Attorney General in contempt on procedural grounds.

The holding that matters now is narrower than either headline: TCL v Guyana established that a private commercial actor, not just a Caricom member state, can bring an enforceable claim against a state under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. For a small economy like Guyana’s, routinely on the receiving end of larger regional and extra-regional capital, that principle is not academic.

THE BHAGWANSINGH WRINKLE

In February 2026, the CCJ dismissed an application from Trinidadian national Mr. Bhagwansingh, who had challenged a Central Bank licensing requirement under T&T’s Financial Institutions Act as a breach of his right to provide financial services under the Treaty. The Court held the claim failed the threshold for special leave because it lacked any cross-border element — the Treaty does not give a national rights against his own state over a purely domestic regulatory matter.

That is a narrow, defensible ruling on its facts. But according to Eboe-Osuji’s account, Justice Anderson has read Bhagwansingh more broadly — as standing for the proposition that a national cannot sue his own state at all. Eboe-Osuji says he pressed, during deliberations in an unrelated matter referred to in his correspondence as the Barrow Referral, to have that ruling clarify that Bhagwansingh does not detract from TCL. Anderson is said to have preferred that the clarification wait for D’Almada — the very case Eboe-Osuji was then removed from hearing.

“The conclusion is inescapable that you removed me from D’Almada because you and I disagree on a point of law that foreseeably defines the fundamental question in that case.”

PROCESS, NOT JUST PRECEDENT

Two things can be true. The wardrobe justification is not credible on its own terms — the Robateau/D’Almada timeline defeats it. And the underlying legal question is genuinely live and consequential: how far can a Caricom national, or a private entity, go in holding a member state to its Treaty obligations. Guyana has been the losing party on that question once already, at a moment when it had no judge of its own on the bench. Who sits on the panel that next defines the boundary is not a procedural footnote.

The CCJ’s institutional response has done nothing to close that gap. Asked fifteen direct questions by the Sunday Express the preceding Wednesday, the Court did not answer them. It issued, two days later and on a Friday night, a general statement invoking the Bangalore Principles and warning that scrutiny “without the benefit of context” risks “misunderstanding or mischaracterisation.”

It did not dispute a single fact in either judge’s correspondence. It did not address the Robateau timeline. A statement that answers none of the specific allegations is not a defence of them — it is a deferral.

That pattern — an announced justification that collapses on its own facts, followed by an institutional statement that reasserts principle rather than answering the record — will be familiar to readers of this publication from other jurisdictions. It is worth naming plainly here: an unexplained exercise of presidential authority over a panel, on a matter where that same president has a stated view on the outcome, is a judicial-independence problem regardless of which court it occurs in.

TO WATCH

Justice Jamadar’s June 30 e-mail — seeking “urgent clarification” on whether Eboe-Osuji’s removal extends beyond D’Almada to all unrobed sittings, and citing Khan v Mc Nicholls (2012) in support — is already on the record and raises the same process question independently of Eboe-Osuji’s own complaint. Whether Jamadar takes this further, in this matter or in how the Barrow Referral ruling is eventually framed, is not yet known. It bears watching.

— The Board