THE CASE RALPH RAMKARRAN DIDN’T MAKE

 THE CASE RALPH RAMKARRAN DIDN’T MAKE

A defense of CCJ President Winston Anderson built entirely on his own account, tested against nothing else in the record

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL BOARD August 2026

Ralph Ramkarran’s “Rumble in the CCJ” is, on its own terms, the most serious defense yet mounted of Justice Winston Anderson. It is not the reflexive institutional-loyalty piece that has otherwise characterized the CCJ’s response to the crisis engulfing it. Ramkarran, a former Senior Counsel and one of the region’s most respected legal commentators, does something almost nobody else defending Anderson has bothered to do: he engages the allegations one by one, on the merits, and reaches a considered legal conclusion — that the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission (RJLSC) has no jurisdiction whatsoever to conduct the “transparent and independent review” it announced on August 10.

That point is correct, and it matters regardless of where anyone lands on Anderson himself. Article V of the Agreement Creating the Caribbean Court of Justice sets out the RJLSC’s powers precisely: appointing and disciplining judges other than the President, recommending the President’s own appointment or removal to the Heads of Government, and determining terms of service.

Nothing in that list authorizes the RJLSC to investigate its own chairman’s conduct as President of the Court. Ramkarran has identified a structural defect in the institution’s own promised remedy — a defect this publication has already been tracking as part of a wider pattern of accountability theater in Guyana: announcements of review, inquiry, or consequence that dissolve on contact with the relevant legal text.

Credit given. The trouble is what the analysis is built on, and what it leaves out.

A DEFENSE BUILT ON THE DEFENDANT’S OWN TESTIMONY

Ramkarran’s case for Anderson rests, almost without exception, on Anderson’s own extensive statement issued Friday, August 14 — the CCJ President’s first public response to the leaked email chain first reported by the Trinidad Express under the headline “Deep Divide at the CCJ.” On the dress code dispute, Ramkarran accepts Anderson’s account that a judge’s insistence on wearing national dress in Chambers precipitated the panel change in D’Almada v TT/Jamaica/Caricom, and that this was the sole reason for it.

On the broader allegations of pressuring judges and influencing rulings, Ramkarran reports that Anderson “said judicial views were not suppressed and no Judge was directed to reach a particular conclusion” — and treats that denial as effectively dispositive.

This is not unreasonable as a starting point. A person accused is entitled to have his account heard in full, and Anderson’s statement deserved exactly the careful reading Ramkarran gave it. But a defense that stops at the accused’s own telling is not yet an analysis — it is a transcription.

And measured against what is actually in the leaked record, Ramkarran’s piece is conspicuously silent on three bodies of evidence that do not come from Anderson, and that a serious reckoning with this crisis cannot skip.

WHAT RAMKARRAN LEAVES OUT, I: JAMADAR

Justice Peter Jamadar’s email is not mentioned anywhere in “Rumble in the CCJ.” That is a significant omission, because Jamadar’s account is not about a dress code at all. Jamadar described the working environment at the Court as “increasingly becoming toxic” and named two specific matters — the Enriquez/Ramlogan trilogy and, more consequentially, the Mohamed extradition case — as instances in which he experienced what he called an attempt “to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed … in an authoritative manner.” He said the experience was “far beyond anything he had ever experienced in all his years as a judge on appellate courts,” and that other judges had expressed the same.

The Mohamed matter, not the dress code, is where a sitting judge has said on the record that he personally experienced pressure toward a particular result.

— the substance of Dionne Jackson Miller’s argument, “Time for Tea”

The Mohamed matter is not a peripheral detail. On July 29, 2026, a CCJ panel of Justices Rajnauth-Lee, Jamadar, and Bulkan unanimously dismissed the extradition appeal brought by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed and his father Nazar Mohamed, clearing the way for US extradition proceedings to resume before Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman. Guyana’s own Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, argued the government side. The ruling was delivered by Justice Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Anderson” — and Anderson was absent from its delivery, for reasons Ramkarran’s source material does not explain. Azruddin Mohamed has since publicly demanded an independent examination of the allegations specifically as they touch his own case.

A defense of Anderson that never mentions Jamadar, never mentions the Mohamed extradition matter, and never grapples with a sitting judge’s on-record claim of experiencing pressure on a live case is not a complete defense. It is a defense of the version of events that happens to be easiest to defend.

WHAT RAMKARRAN LEAVES OUT, II: EBOE-OSUJI, BULKAN, AND THE PATTERN

Ramkarran’s piece treats the removal of Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji from the D’Almada panel as an isolated, adequately explained incident. It was not received that way by Eboe-Osuji himself. In his own email, Eboe-Osuji said he had “never seen before the level of dictatorship in the administration of a judiciary” that he had witnessed at the CCJ in recent months, and recounted that Anderson told judges early in his presidency that he did not see himself as “running a democracy” and would run the Court “in any way he sees fit.” Eboe-Osuji further cited a prior matter, Barrow v Caricom, as an earlier instance in which he says Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions.”

Justice Arif Bulkan’s email adds an institutional argument Ramkarran does not engage at all. Bulkan wrote that the content of a judge’s opinion is “very clearly a matter within our sole discretion,” and explained why appellate panels are deliberately staffed with more than one judge: if a president could simply overrule the majority, he asked, what would be the point of a panel at all? Bulkan connected this directly to why a majority of Caribbean states — including Trinidad and Tobago, whose Prime Minister has “clearly articulated their distrust” of the Court — have not acceded to the CCJ’s appellate jurisdiction: the fear that a single judge could impose an outcome is precisely what keeps them out.

This is the distinction Ramkarran’s piece never draws, and it is the one that matters most. Judges disagreeing with each other is not a crisis — it is the ordinary business of an appellate court, which is exactly why panels are staffed in odd numbers, to produce a tiebreaker rather than demand unanimity. What Jamadar, Eboe-Osuji, and Bulkan describe is not disagreement among equals.

It is an allegation that the presiding judge tried to substitute his own view for the panel’s, on matters where the Agreement creating the CCJ gives him no such authority.

Ramkarran’s “robust discussion, if not attaining the level of intimidation” framing treats this as a matter of tone. The judges who wrote these emails are not describing tone.

WHAT RAMKARRAN LEAVES OUT, III: GUYANA, REFRAMED BY ANDERSON’S OWN ADMISSION

Ramkarran defends Anderson’s private intervention in Guyana’s stalled Chancellor and Chief Justice appointments by noting that two of Anderson’s predecessors as CCJ President also publicly raised concerns about the delay. That is true as far as it goes, and it is a point worth verifying against the Byron and Saunders record rather than dismissing. But it is also, notably, no longer where Anderson himself has chosen to rest his own defense.

In his August 14 statement, Anderson conceded the intervention was a mistake in its method, if not its underlying constitutional concern: “Looking back, I recognise that another course would have been much better. It may have been better to have confined myself to public commentary on the constitutional importance of substantive judicial appointments, as did my predecessors.”

That is Anderson distinguishing his own conduct from his predecessors’ — they raised the issue publicly; he raised it privately, in multiple calls to then-Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton, in which he reportedly floated the possibility that then-Acting Chancellor Yonette Cummings might agree to early retirement. Cummings did subsequently take early retirement amid suspicion she had been pushed out, after which President Ali installed his own preferred acting appointees — appointments that remain unconfirmed ten months later. Ramkarran’s predecessor comparison elides precisely the distinction Anderson himself now draws.

THE RECUSAL QUESTION RAMKARRAN’S OWN ARGUMENT CREATES

Here is the deepest problem with “Rumble in the CCJ” as a piece of reasoning: Ramkarran correctly establishes that the RJLSC has no jurisdiction to review Anderson’s conduct — and then stops, as though the absence of jurisdiction were itself the end of the matter. It is not. It raises the next, more obvious question, which Ramkarran never asks: given that the RJLSC’s chairman is Anderson himself, who exactly did the RJLSC imagine would be conducting this “transparent and independent review” of him?

Martin Daly, a former RJLSC member and Senior Counsel, has already answered that question publicly, and bluntly: “The president of the court is chairman of the RJLSC, but he must, of course, recuse himself from participating in an investigation of administrative decisions made by him. It is unfortunate that the practice of appointing a deputy chairman of the commission was not sustained.”

Broadcaster and attorney Dionne Jackson Miller made a version of the same structural point on her program “Time for Tea,” arguing that treating this as an internal matter for the Court to resolve behind closed doors — rather than a matter of legitimate public concern once published — is itself what most endangers the institution. Her point was blunt: the public cannot simply be shut out of the room and asked to trust that those inside will handle it responsibly.

Jackson Miller’s broader argument is worth setting directly against Ramkarran’s, because the two are, in effect, answering different questions about the same facts. Ramkarran’s central concern is that the leak itself — the “unauthorized disclosure of internal deliberations” — has damaged the Court and ought to be a subject of scrutiny in its own right, potentially alongside or even instead of the underlying allegations.

Jackson Miller’s response, delivered before Ramkarran’s piece but answering the same reflex, warned specifically against the instinct within the legal community to “close ranks” and “circle the wagons” around the institution rather than confront what the emails actually describe. She argued that treating the leak as the primary scandal is precisely the wrong response to a crisis of this scale — and that once judges’ own emails describe a president who told colleagues he did not see himself “running a democracy,” the public’s business in the matter is no longer optional. Notably, the CCJ’s own statement to the Trinidad Express — which answered none of fifteen direct questions — did not dispute that the emails were authentic. Nobody at the Court, including Anderson, has denied writing what is attributed to them.

Ramkarran does end his piece by turning the tables on the leakers, suggesting that if the RJLSC is to “review” anything, it should also review whether the Court’s confidential business was improperly disclosed. That is a fair question to raise. But raising it as a kind of counterweight to the substance of what was disclosed — rather than as a separate matter to be pursued in parallel — is the same instinct Jackson Miller warned against: a pull toward litigating the leak instead of the leaked.

WHAT ACTUALLY NEEDS ANSWERING

None of this means Ramkarran’s piece was written in bad faith, or that Anderson’s account should be dismissed rather than tested. It means the account has not yet been tested — not by Ramkarran, and not, meaningfully, by the RJLSC, whose chairman is the man it would be reviewing.

Three questions remain open regardless of how sympathetically Anderson’s own statement is read:

⇒What, specifically, did Justice Jamadar experience in relation to the Mohamed extradition ruling, and does it hold up under independent examination?

⇒What does Barrow v Caricom show about whether the D’Almada panel change was really a first-time, isolated response to attire, as Anderson maintains, rather than one instance of a pattern several judges independently describe?

⇒And who, structurally, is positioned to conduct a genuinely independent review, if not the body chaired by the man under review?

Ramkarran gave the region a serious legal argument about the limits of the RJLSC’s authority. He did not give it an accounting of what five judges, writing independently of one another, say they experienced. Both are needed. Only one has been supplied.

Sources: Ralph Ramkarran, “Rumble in the CCJ”; Trinidad Express, “Deep Divide at the CCJ” (Mark Bassant); Jamaica Gleaner, Aug. 15, 2026; Kaieteur News, Aug. 14–15, 2026; Demerara Waves, Aug. 10 & 12, 2026; NewsAmericasNow, Aug. 14, 2026; Dionne Jackson Miller, “Time for Tea,” episode on the CCJ crisis.