“Not Running a Democracy”: Anderson Makes Good on His Own Word

 “Not Running a Democracy”: Anderson Makes Good on His Own Word

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

On August 14, 2026, CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson issued a nine-page statement rejecting allegations that he had manipulated panel composition to influence case outcomes. He called the suggestion “irresponsible, intellectually dishonest, injudicious and quite simply, malevolent.” He announced a structural remedy — every judge would henceforth sit on every panel unless excused for legitimate reason — and gave no sign he intended to resign.

Three weeks later, according to a six-page e-mail Justice Peter Jamadar sent on September 4, 2026 to Anderson, the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission, fellow judges and court staff, Anderson was personally present while Jamadar’s own administrative officer, Candace Simmons-Peters, was questioned about her printing records, her work hours, her communications with Jamadar, and documents connected to an RJLSC-facilitated intervention. She was required to surrender her CCJ computer for examination. And, Jamadar alleges, Anderson referenced the possibility of a two-year prison sentence under Trinidad and Tobago’s Computer Misuse Act.

This is not a continuation of the dress-code dispute. It is a different and more serious category of conduct, and it deserves to be named as such: a sitting president of the region’s apex court, already under formal allegation of panel-fixing from a majority of his own bench, using an internal leak investigation to question a judge’s staff about that judge’s private and professional activities — with a criminal statute invoked in the room.

WHAT ANDERSON PROMISED, WHAT ANDERSON DID

Anderson’s own August 14 statement is now the measure against which his September conduct must be read. He did not merely deny panel-fixing — he characterized the very inference as malevolent, staking his credibility on there being no pattern of unilateral overreach beneath the dress-code dispute. He proposed a fix explicitly designed to remove his own discretion over panel composition going forward.

Nothing in that statement reserved him a role in personally investigating a sitting judge’s staff, examining their computer, or sitting in on a conversation in which a criminal prison term was raised. If the August remedy was sincere, the September conduct is very difficult to square with it. If it was not, the remedy was theatre — a controlled concession on the issue already public, offered to forestall scrutiny of what remained private.

THREE INCIDENTS, ONE PATTERN — IN JAMADAR’S OWN WORDS

Jamadar’s complaint does not rest on the Simmons-Peters episode alone. He lays out three incidents he says cannot be viewed in isolation: a judges’ meeting where Anderson’s stance shifted from inviting in-person attendance to expecting it; the questioning of his administrative officer; and an earlier August meeting where Anderson told him that non-attendance might give Anderson “a reason to write to you” — language Jamadar calls “shocking.” He notes that fellow judge Maureen Rajnauth-Lee received a similarly pointed e-mail, while three other judges who made the same postponement request did not.

“Certainly, I feel targeted, harassed, and bullied (directly or indirectly) by their occurrence, and their proximity to the wider contexts that are related to the broader and unresolved impasse among the judges and the CCJ President.”

Selective treatment of judges who raised the same objection, on the same point, is itself a data point. Of five judges who sought to postpone an August meeting, two — Jamadar and Rajnauth-Lee — received pointed follow-up from Anderson. The other three did not. Jamadar and Rajnauth-Lee are, notably, two of the five judges on record from the original leaked correspondence raising concerns about Anderson’s leadership. The selection is not random on its face, and Anderson’s own August statement offers no account of it, because the question had not yet been asked.

THE STRUCTURAL OBJECTION JAMADAR RAISES HIMSELF

Jamadar’s complaint identifies the same institutional defect already flagged in this publication’s prior coverage of Ralph Ramkarran’s defense of Anderson: Anderson chairs the RJLSC, the body with nominal authority to review conduct at the court, and he is also the central figure in the underlying dispute. Jamadar asks directly whether Anderson should play any role in investigating judges or staff when he is himself closely involved in the matter under investigation — and whether the RJLSC even knew of, approved, or supported the inquiry being conducted in its name.

No answer has been provided. The Sunday Express sent questions to Anderson, the court’s communications department and the RJLSC on September 30, resent them October 5, and received nothing by press time. That is the same silence this publication has tracked through the August 14 statement, the Aug 13 joint Heads of Judiciary statement, and the unanswered fifteen questions over D’Almada. An institution capable of a nine-page rebuttal when the allegation is public has had five weeks to answer six questions put to it privately, and has chosen not to.

RETRIBUTION, OR SOMETHING THE COURT SHOULD STILL BE ASKED TO RULE OUT

Is this retribution? The honest answer is that the record, as it stands, supports the inference without yet proving it. Jamadar was one of five judges whose concerns about Anderson’s leadership became public in August. He is now one of two judges, out of five who made an identical request, singled out for a pointed response from Anderson. His administrative officer was questioned in the course of a leak investigation about material — an RJLSC-facilitated intervention file — that Jamadar says has no logical connection to the alleged disclosure to the press. And the questioning of that officer escalated to a reference to criminal prison time.

None of that proves Jamadar was the Sunday Express’s source, and this publication is not asserting that he was — nor does Jamadar’s own e-mail make that claim about himself. What the record does show is a president who, having been accused of punishing a judge over a point of disagreement once already, is now the central figure in an investigation that a second judge experienced as punitive, run through that judge’s own staff, with a criminal statute invoked as leverage.

Whether Jamadar leaked the correspondence is a question only the investigation he is now objecting to could answer honestly — which is precisely why it should not be Anderson conducting it.

Anderson told his colleagues in July 2025 that he did not see himself as “running a democracy.” In May 2026, he overrode a colleague on a point of law rather than let it be aired collegially in Barrow v Caricom. In June, he removed Eboe-Osuji from a panel over a disagreement he later insisted was purely about attire — a claim the Robateau timeline does not support. In August, he denied all of it in the strongest possible terms and promised reform. In September, by his own administrative officer’s apparent experience and Jamadar’s sworn account, he personally oversaw an inquiry into a sitting judge’s private affairs with a prison sentence on the table.

Each incident, taken alone, might be explained away. Taken together, across six months, they describe a president who has been entirely consistent — just not in the way his August statement promised.

— The Board