THE JUDGE WHO INTERFERED

THE JUDGE WHO INTERFERED

Justice Winston Anderson admits pressing Guyana’s Opposition Leader to accept the President’s judicial nominees — and calls it, in hindsight, a mistake

The 592 Guardian — Editorial Board

Guyanese are well versed in one direction of constitutional trespass: the executive reaching into the judiciary. Justice Winston Anderson, President of the Caribbean Court of Justice, has now confirmed the reverse — the region’s most senior judicial officer reaching into a live constitutional negotiation between Guyana’s President and its Opposition Leader, and pressing one side to yield to the other.

Copy of Justice Anderson’s statements

In a statement issued Friday — offered mostly to address the leaked internal emails now engulfing his presidency of the CCJ — Anderson confirmed he traveled to Guyana in October 2025 and met separately with President Irfaan Ali and then-Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton. His stated aim was to break the deadlock over substantive appointments to the offices of Chancellor and Chief Justice, vacant in substantive form for more than two decades. He said the conversations were frank, undertaken solely in the interest of judicial independence, and did not produce the outcome he’d hoped for.

Then came the admission: “Looking back, I recognise that another course would have been much better.” Anderson said he ought to have confined himself to public commentary, as his predecessors Sir Dennis Byron and Justice Adrian Saunders had done when raising the same concern.

That is a notable thing for a sitting CCJ President to say about himself. It is a far more serious thing when set beside what Norton has since said about what those “frank” conversations actually involved.

WHAT NORTON SAYS HAPPENED

Earlier this week, Norton recalled receiving multiple calls from Anderson on the appointments question — calls in which, Norton says, Anderson pressed him to agree to the President’s nominees. Norton says his concern deepened when Anderson referenced the possibility of then-Acting Chancellor Yonette Cummings agreeing to an early retirement package.

Copy of Justice Anderson’s statements

That detail matters because of what Norton wanted and what happened next. Norton had backed Cummings for substantive Chancellor and Justice Roxane George for substantive Chief Justice. Ali’s preference ran the other way: George elevated to Chancellor, with Justice Navindra Singh installed as Chief Justice.

Cummings then took early retirement — a departure Norton and others have treated with open suspicion that she was pushed out. With the obstacle to the President’s preferred arrangement removed, Ali made his two preferred candidates acting appointees. No substantive appointment has been made since. A new Opposition Leader has now held that office for more than six months  now . The President has made no move to seek his agreement on anything.

The deadlock Anderson says he flew to Guyana to help resolve was not resolved by agreement. It was resolved by the removal of the person standing between the President and his preferred slate.

Line up the dates and the outcome, and the deadlock Anderson says he flew to Guyana to help resolve was not resolved by agreement between Guyana’s constitutional actors. It was resolved by the removal of the person standing between the President and his preferred slate — a removal the sitting CCJ President appears to have raised with the Opposition Leader in advance, as leverage.

THE PART ANDERSON ISN’T REFLECTING ON

Anderson’s admission arrives carefully bounded. He is contrite about how he pursued judicial independence — the personal visit, the private calls, the departure from precedent set by Byron and Saunders. He is not contrite, and has offered no comment at all, on what he pressed for: an outcome that tracked the President’s preferences and required the removal of the candidate the Opposition supported.

Copy of Justice Anderson’s statements

He also insists, without elaboration, that the concerns were his alone — “not motivated by any political or other preference, personal interest, or any desire to intervene in the domestic affairs of Guyana.” That claim now sits uneasily next to Norton’s account of a CCJ President naming a specific retirement mechanism to a sitting Opposition Leader, in a call about which nominee he should accept.

This is not the first time Anderson has been described operating this way. Guyanese readers who have followed the leaked-email controversy convulsing the CCJ this month will recognise the pattern: a majority of his own judicial colleagues have accused him, in writing, of running the regional court in an “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” manner — unilaterally imposing a dress code over objection, attempting to influence colleagues’ opinions “in an authoritative manner” in specific cases, and remarking to fellow judges that he did not see himself as “running a democracy.” Justice Jamadar and Justice Eboe-Osuji have both put allegations of this kind on the record.

Anderson has found the capacity for public self-correction on the Guyana appointments matter — a matter concerning politicians in a foreign capital, disclosed voluntarily, in a statement he controlled. He has offered no equivalent reflection on the allegations of unilateral conduct inside his own court, made by his own colleagues, which he did not disclose voluntarily and has largely declined to answer on the merits.

WHAT REMAINS OPEN

Two questions follow directly from Anderson’s own statement and Norton’s account, and neither has been answered.

First, did Anderson’s intervention — whatever its intent — have the practical effect of helping engineer Cummings’ removal and clearing the path to the President’s preferred appointees? Anderson denies preference for either candidate. The sequence of events does not corroborate neutrality.

Second, if the CCJ President regarded substantive judicial appointments in Guyana as urgent enough to warrant a personal visit and direct pressure on an Opposition Leader in October 2025, why has he said nothing publicly in the ten months since — through Cummings’ departure, the acting appointments, and six months of a new Opposition Leader receiving no outreach at all?

The silence of a man who once thought this problem worth intervening in person is its own kind of statement.

Guyana’s Chancellor and Chief Justice offices remain, more than two decades on, without substantive holders. That is a genuine constitutional defect, and Anderson was right to name it as one. But the record now shows that in trying to fix it, the head of the region’s apex court did not merely comment on a structural vulnerability in Guyana’s judiciary.

He stepped into the vulnerability itself, pressed one side of a live negotiation to fold, and is now asking to be credited for admitting, after the fact, that he shouldn’t have.

— The Board