Archive for category: Opinions

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

Circling the Wagons Won’t Save the CCJ: Why CARICOM Leaders Must Trigger a Full Probe

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OPINION BY: Staff Writer

The unfolding controversy at the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) is doing something rare in regional public life: it is forcing the Caribbean legal fraternity to choose between reflexive solidarity and constitutional principle. The response so far has been uneven—and deeply revealing.

On Thursday, the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States Bar Association (OECSBA) and the Organization of Commonwealth Caribbean Bar Associations (OCCBA) issued a joint statement that deserves close attention. In measured language, they called for a thorough investigation into the leak of internal emails among CCJ judges and, more importantly, for the allegations against CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson to be investigated to determine their “honesty and accuracy.”

That is not a casual formulation. When bar associations speak of honesty and accuracy in relation to a sitting court president, they are effectively saying that the matter goes beyond personality clashes and administrative disputes. They are pointing to issues that may go to the heart of the Court’s integrity.

Equally significant is what they did not do. They did not join the chorus of premature exoneration. They did not suggest that the public controversy is unfortunate only because it has embarrassed the Court. Instead, they insisted on fact-finding: whether the internal correspondence reflects “legitimate matters warranting institutional attention or internal politicking, grandstanding or perhaps misunderstandings.” That is the right starting point. You investigate first; you pronounce later.

The OECSBA and OCCBA also directly confronted the second crisis now engulfing the CCJ: the leak itself. “Whether or not the public disclosures were as a result of an intentional or accidental leak or an orchestrated hack, the technical, security and computer systems at the CCJ require careful scrutiny and urgent remediation,” they wrote. In other words, the region’s apex court cannot credibly adjudicate disputes about data, privacy and cybercrime while its own internal communications are apparently vulnerable to either sabotage or carelessness.

Institutional independence in the 21st century is not just about tenure and salaries; it is about basic information security.

But the most consequential intervention has come not from the bench, nor from a government, but from a prominent Caribbean attorney. Guyanese lawyer Nigel Hughes has rightly cautioned that “investigating and removing the president of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) is a complex process that cannot be done merely by a review.” He points us back to the founding instrument of the Court, which requires that at least three CARICOM heads of government trigger the formal process to investigate and, if necessary, remove a CCJ president.

This is not a matter that can be tidied up by an internal “transparent and independent review” alone, however well intentioned.

Hughes’ central point is unassailable: if the allegations against Justice Anderson are true, “they go to the heart of the Court’s integrity.” Once you accept that premise, the logical conclusion follows. The matter cannot be contained within the Court’s own walls or outsourced solely to the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission (RJLSC). At a certain threshold of gravity, apex court accountability becomes a constitutional question for the political leadership of CARICOM, acting under the very treaty framework that created the CCJ.

This is where the emerging stance of the regional bar associations is so important—and so welcome. Their call for investigation directly aligns with the view that three or more CARICOM leaders should invoke the relevant provisions of the CCJ Agreement to move beyond informal “review” language and into a structured, legally grounded process.

That process must have clear terms of reference, defined powers of inquiry, and outcomes that command public confidence, whether it ultimately vindicates or censures the sitting president.

By contrast, the reaction from within parts of the Eastern Caribbean judicial establishment has raised serious concerns. Signals from the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court environment suggest an instinctive circling of the wagons around Justice Anderson, framing the matter as an assault on judicial independence rather than an opportunity to prove that independence through transparent self-scrutiny.

That posture may be emotionally understandable—judges everywhere are conditioned to resist perceived political interference—but it is constitutionally short-sighted

Judicial independence is not a shield against investigation; it is a guarantee that any investigation will be free from political retaliation and partisan manipulation. When allegations arise inside an apex court, an immediate reflex to defend the office-holder, before facts are established, confuses loyalty to a colleague with loyalty to the institution. It also risks sending the wrong message to the public: that Caribbean judges will demand accountability of everyone except themselves.

Here is the real danger. If the CCJ responds to this crisis by treating it primarily as a reputational problem rather than a governance problem, it will inflict long-term damage on the very project that OECSBA and OCCBA have championed for years—the gradual transition from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to the CCJ as the final appellate court for all CARICOM states.

The bar associations rightly remind us that their “unwavering support for the CCJ has been consistently maintained and endorsed by the bar associations of the 15 member states comprising OCCBA.”

That support was never blind. It was based on a considered examination of the Court’s work and its commitment to fairness and impartiality.

Support grounded in principle cannot now be twisted into a blank cheque. The same regional legal community that fought for an indigenous apex court has a duty to demand that that court be governed in accordance with the highest standards. That includes:

• A credible, independent investigation into the leak of internal emails, with clear findings on whether there was hacking, internal sabotage, or systemic IT weaknesses.
• A formal, treaty-compliant process—triggered by at least three CARICOM heads of government—for investigating the allegations against the CCJ President, rather than relying solely on a vague “review.”
• Full engagement of the RJLSC, not as a public relations buffer, but as a constitutional actor prepared to draw hard conclusions and recommend difficult remedies if warranted.

It is noteworthy that OECSBA and OCCBA have offered themselves as potential mediators “in a dignified way with the overarching objective of preserving the integrity and independence of the CCJ as well as the independence of the judiciary comprising the CCJ.” Mediation may have a role in mending relationships among judges and in restoring internal collegiality, but it cannot substitute for formal inquiry.

Institutional integrity is not a personality conflict to be settled around a conference table; it is a constitutional question to be answered on the evidence, according to law.

The associations have also urged the media to report and comment in a “measured, accurate and fair manner,” and that is a reasonable request. But “measured” does not mean muted. The press has a duty to follow the trail where it leads—through leaked emails, institutional statements, and silence from key actors—and to question whether “transparent and independent review” language is being used as a smokescreen for inertia.

In fact, the best way to protect the CCJ’s reputation now is not to suppress debate, but to insist on processes that can withstand it.

At this moment, OECSBA and OCCBA’s reaffirmation of confidence in the CCJ and RJLSC should not be read as complacency. Rather, it is a conditional trust: confidence that these institutions are “well placed to address and resolve the issues” if they choose to use the tools already embedded in the CCJ’s founding framework. Those tools explicitly contemplate the possibility that a sitting president may face allegations “grave” enough to require a heads-of-government-triggered probe.

Pretending otherwise does not uphold judicial independence; it undermines the treaty architecture that was supposed to protect it.

 

CARICOM political leaders now have an unavoidable choice. They can hide behind platitudes about respecting judicial independence, decline to act, and hope that an internal review calms the waters. Or they can accept that the CCJ is no ordinary institution, that its legitimacy underpins everything from criminal justice to the CARICOM Single Market, and that allegations touching the core of its integrity demand a response that matches the seriousness of the moment.

The bar associations have done their part by publicly insisting on investigation and by keeping their support for the CCJ tied to its performance, not its prestige. Nigel Hughes has reminded us that the Agreement establishing the Court was written for precisely these difficult days. The next move belongs to the region’s heads of government. If they truly believe that “the interest and preservation of the CCJ as an apex institution for the administration of Justice in the Commonwealth Caribbean demands no less,” they must demonstrate that belief not with statements of confidence, but with the activation of the very protections they once signed into law.

Silence will not save the CCJ. Only law, applied fearlessly and without favour—even to its own president—can.

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 Turned Off: GWI’s Five-Region Disconnection Campaign and the Regulatory Order Nobody Can Confirm Was Followed

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OPINION BY: Staff Writer — The 592 Guardian

As Guyana Water Inc. prepares to cut service house-to-house across Regions 3, 4, 6 and 10 this week, a 2022 regulatory order meant to guarantee due process and public reporting appears to have gone unmonitored — and neither the utility nor its regulator can say why.

Beginning August 10, Guyana Water Inc. (GWI) will send crews house-to-house through Georgetown, East Bank Demerara, East Coast Demerara, West Coast/West Bank Demerara and parts of Region Six, disconnecting customers with outstanding balances. The five-day campaign, publicised through a series of regional notices, covers dozens of named communities — from Alberttown and Kitty in the capital to Corriverton-Dukestown on the Corentyne — and arrives with a single instruction to residents: settle up, or lose water.

The notices are silent on a set of protections that GWI’s own regulator ordered into place nearly four years ago. In September 2022, following a formal challenge from the Guyana Consumers Association, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) issued Order 2 of 2022, upholding GWI’s disputed $7,500 reconnection fee but attaching conditions: a longer disconnection-notice period, a higher grace threshold before cutoff, a directive to review disconnection methods for cost-effectiveness, and — critically — a requirement that GWI file monthly reports to the PUC disclosing how many customers were disconnected, their outstanding balances, the methods used, and reconnection figures.

A related metering order set a December 2024 deadline for 100% metering of previously unmetered consumers, with quarterly progress reports due along the way.

The 592 Guardian sought to determine whether either compliance stream — the monthly disconnection reports or the metering updates — has actually been filed, and whether the 24-hour notice and $12,500 grace threshold set in 2022 are being honoured in this week’s campaign.

Neither GWI nor the PUC could provide a definitive answer. Both pointed, in substance, to an ongoing transition to digital systems.

THE 2022 ORDER: A REAL CONCESSION, WITH STRINGS ATTACHED

The 2022 proceeding is worth recalling in full, because it complicates any simple narrative of a state utility acting with impunity. Dr. Yog Mahadeo, appearing for the Guyana Consumers Association, argued before the Commission that GWI’s disconnection practices should be reconsidered altogether, invoking UN General Assembly Resolution 64/292 — the 2010 recognition of water as a human right — and pressing the Commission to review what he characterised as a punitive reconnection fee.

GWI’s then-CEO, Shaik Baksh, defended the fee on financial grounds, telling the Commission that the utility’s actual disconnection and reconnection costs already exceeded what the $7,500 charge recovered, and that a 2021 customer-assistance programme waiving half the fee had not achieved its intended effect and was discontinued.

The Commission’s ruling split the difference. It upheld the $7,500 fee — finding it did not exceed GWI’s own recovery costs — but it did not treat the matter as closed. Effective January 1, 2023, GWI was ordered to raise its credit/grace limit from $10,000 to $12,500, extend disconnection notice from four hours to twenty-four, review its disconnection methods, and submit monthly disaggregated reports to the PUC on every disconnection: who, why, how much was owed, how the cutoff was carried out, and when — if ever — service was restored.

“The fee was never defied. It was reviewed, and upheld, by the regulator — with a paper trail attached. The open question is what happened to that paper trail.”

That reporting requirement is the piece of Order 2 that matters most for this week’s campaign. It exists precisely so that a mass disconnection drive like the one now underway in five regions could be checked against a public record — how many households are losing water, whether vulnerable customers are among them, and whether the 24-hour notice and $12,500 threshold are being applied. In November 2023, GWI itself filed for a review of aspects of Order 2; the substance of that filing and its outcome are not available in the PUC’s public archive.

A COMPLIANCE TRAIL THAT GOES COLD

The PUC’s website lists dedicated pages for Monthly Reports, Annual Reports, and PUC Orders — the exact mechanism through which GWI’s obligations under Order 2 would be made public.     As of this reporting, none of those pages show content past early 2024; the Commission’s own news and orders listings likewise thin out around February 2024.

Whether that reflects a genuine gap in filings, a backlog in publishing filings that exist, or simply a website not being maintained is not something that can be determined from the public record alone.

The 592 Guardian put the question directly to both institutions:    ♦ Has GWI filed the monthly disconnection reports required since January 2023?

♦ Was the December 2024 metering deadline met, and were the required quarterly progress reports submitted?

♦ Is the 24-hour notice period, and the $12,500 grace threshold, being applied in the current five-region campaign?

Neither GWI nor the PUC provided a definitive answer to any of the three questions. The explanation offered, in substance, was that both institutions are in the midst of a transition to digital record-keeping systems, and that the requested data was not readily retrievable in the interim.

AN EXCUSE THAT PREDATES THE DEADLINE IT’S MISSING

That explanation does not sit comfortably against the government’s own digitisation timeline. President Irfaan Ali announced in September 2025 that most government services would be fully digitised by the end of the second quarter of 2026 — a deadline that has now passed. The obligations in question, moreover, are not digital-transformation projects. They are statutory reporting duties created by a regulatory order issued in 2022, with a first report due in January 2023 — twenty months before the digitisation programme was even announced, and well before any system upgrade could plausibly explain their absence.

If a national digitisation push that was supposed to conclude in June is now the reason a state utility and its own regulator cannot confirm compliance with a nearly four-year-old order, that is itself a finding: it suggests either the digitisation programme has slipped its own deadline without public acknowledgment, or — more troublingly — that the underlying compliance gap predates any system transition and the digitisation explanation has become a ready-made answer for record-keeping failures that were already occurring.

WHAT THE HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARD ACTUALLY REQUIRES

It is tempting, watching a disconnection notice reach this many communities at once, to reach immediately for the language of a human rights violation. The international standard is more precise than that, and worth stating accurately.

The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in its General Comment No. 15 on the right to water, holds that where disconnection follows non-payment, a customer’s capacity to pay must be taken into account, and that no one may be deprived of the minimum essential level of water regardless of ability to pay. Arbitrary or unjustified disconnection — as distinct from disconnection that follows due process and preserves a minimum supply — is what the Committee identifies as a violation.

On that standard, GWI’s public-facing materials are not, on their face, out of step: the utility’s own FAQ describes disconnection as a last resort after non-payment and points customers toward negotiated payment arrangements before cutoff. The 2022 PUC order, likewise, built in real procedural protections — more notice, a higher grace threshold, mandated reporting.

The gap is not in the written policy. It is in the absence of any current, checkable evidence that the policy’s own safeguards are being followed during a campaign of this scale.

 

QUESTIONS ON THE RECORD

The 592 Guardian is publishing this piece with those questions unresolved, rather than waiting on institutions that have not been able to answer them.

We put the following to GWI and the PUC and will update this record as responses are received:

1. Have GWI’s monthly disconnection reports, required under Order 2 of 2022 since January 2023, been filed with the PUC for every month since that date? If any months are missing, which, and why?
2. Was the December 3, 2024 deadline for 100% metering of unmetered consumers met? If not, what is the current metering completion rate, and were the required quarterly progress reports filed?
3. In the disconnection campaign now underway across Regions 3, 4, 6 and 10, is the 24-hour notice period and the $12,500 grace threshold set by Order 2 being applied to every household disconnected?
4. Does GWI screen for vulnerable households — elderly, disabled, or health-dependent customers — before disconnection, and if so, under what published policy?
5. What was the substance and outcome of GWI’s November 2023 application to review Order 2 of 2022?
6. When will the PUC’s Monthly Reports and Annual Reports archives be updated to reflect filings, if any, made since early 2024?

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Guyana’s disconnection framework is not, on paper, indifferent to hardship. It has a regulator that has intervened before, a fee structure the Commission has scrutinised, and reporting requirements designed to make mass campaigns like this one auditable rather than opaque. What appears to be missing is not the rule but its enforcement — or, at minimum, the public evidence that enforcement is occurring. A five-region disconnection drive is precisely the moment that evidence should be easiest to produce. That it is not says less about whether GWI’s policy meets the human rights standard on paper, and more about whether Guyana’s regulatory institutions can currently show their own work.

In a season defined by El Niño’s scorching heat and parched communities, GWI’s mass disconnection campaign is more than administrative overreach; it is a chilling indictment of how far removed our decision-makers have become from the lived reality of ordinary Guyanese.

To cut water in the middle of a climate crisis is not just poor judgment, it is an act that flirts with cruelty, stripping families of the most basic means of survival while mouthing clichés about “management” and “efficiency.”

This campaign reveals a system that punishes instead of protects, one that treats water as a bill to be chased rather than a lifeline to be safeguarded.

If this is how we govern in the face of El Niño, then the real drought we face is one of empathy, accountability, and common sense—and that disconnect is more dangerous than any dry spell.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from Guyana Water Inc. and the Public Utilities Commission prior to publication. This report will be updated with any response received.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊INTEGRITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

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