A STATEMENT GUYANA DIDN’T HAVE TO SHARE

A STATEMENT GUYANA DIDN’T HAVE TO SHARE

OPINION BY: Staff Writer—August 2026

Why did Guyana’s Chancellor of the Judiciary fold a direct conflict of interest into a joint statement, instead of speaking independently?

When the region’s Heads of Judiciary issued their joint statement on August 13 expressing “grave concern” over the confidentiality breach at the Caribbean Court of Justice, Guyana’s Chancellor of the Juidicary  was among the signatories. So was the Chief Justice of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court — the superior court of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, an institution to which Guyana does not belong. The two signed separately, for separate courts, on the same document.

That much is a matter of record, not confusion.

The question worth asking is not why Guyana’s name sits beside the ECSC’s. It is why Guyana’s Chancellor chose to sign a joint statement — one crafted broadly enough to cover Barbados, the Bahamas, Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the ECSC bloc all at once — rather than issue an independent statement of her own.

GUYANA IS NOT A BYSTANDER IN THIS DISPUTE

The joint statement treats every signatory as equally distant from the substance of the allegations against CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson. For most of the signing jurisdictions, that framing may be defensible. For Guyana, it is not.

Two matters inside the leaked internal correspondence bear directly, and specifically, on Guyana.

The first is Bhagwansingh, the February 2026 CCJ ruling whose interpretation — broad or narrow — will determine whether Guyana’s own exposure under TCL v Guyana [2009] CCJ 5 (OJ) remains intact or is quietly narrowed. That dispute over how Bhagwansingh should be read is, by Justice Eboe-Osuji’s own account, the reason he was removed from the D’Almada panel in the first place. This newsroom has reported that ground already, at length.

The second is more direct still, and it has not yet been given the weight it deserves. Justice Peter Jamadar, in his internal email to fellow CCJ judges, named the Mohamed v MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter as one of two specific instances in which he experienced Justice Anderson attempting “to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner.” That case was not an abstraction. It was Guyana’s own case. The Minister of Home Affairs, the Attorney General, and a sitting Magistrate of Guyana were named respondents. Guyana’s Attorney General, Mohabir Anil Nandlall, argued the government’s position before the court.

The CCJ unanimously dismissed the appeal by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed and his father on July 29, clearing the way for US extradition proceedings to resume — a ruling delivered by Justice Denys Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson,” and presented publicly as settled and unanimous.

Guyana’s Attorney General stood on one side of the Mohamed extradition matter. A sitting CCJ judge has alleged the court’s president tried to steer the outcome of that very case.

Jamadar’s account suggests the deliberations behind that unanimity were considerably less settled than the public judgment let on. Justice Eboe-Osuji, in the same correspondence, went further still, alleging Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions” — and was, by Anderson’s own account, absent from the case’s judgment delivery for reasons that were never specified.

Azruddin Mohamed has since publicly demanded an independent examination of the allegations, on the basis that they concern his own case.

TWO GOVERNMENTS, TWO POSITIONS, ONE SIGNATURE

This is not a hypothetical conflict of interest. Guyana’s Attorney General stood on one side of the Mohamed extradition matter. A sitting CCJ judge has now alleged, in writing, that the president of the court attempted to steer the outcome of that very case. Guyana’s government — through its AG — was a direct party to the proceeding a CCJ judge says may have been compromised by presidential overreach.

That is not the position of Barbados, or the Bahamas, or Belize, or the ECSC’s nine member territories, none of which had a government litigant inside the disputed case.

It is Guyana’s position, and Guyana’s alone.

A joint statement lets every signatory share both the cover and the ambiguity of collective phrasing. “Grave concern” about a confidentiality breach, expressed by seven Heads of Judiciary together, commits none of them individually to answering for the substance of what was breached.

An independent statement from Guyana’s Chancellor of the Judiciary would have carried no such shelter. It would have had to address, explicitly or by conspicuous omission, whether Guyana’s judiciary has any view on an allegation that its own government’s litigation was the subject of alleged presidential interference at the region’s apex court.

That is a different kind of statement, with a different kind of fallout — and it is the statement Guyana did not make.

THE QUESTION THIS PUBLICATION IS PUTTING ON RECORD

Why did Guyana’s Chancellor choose to fold Guyana’s position into a joint statement covering jurisdictions with no comparable stake in the underlying allegations, rather than address, independently, a matter in which Guyana’s own Attorney General was a named litigant?

Guyana’s judiciary owes the public more than shared cover. It owes an answer to why silence, diffused across seven signatures, was judged the safer course than an independent word of its own.

— The Board