Unanimous on the Verdict, Silent on the Verdict-Giver

Unanimous on the Verdict, Silent on the Verdict-Giver

OPINION BY: Staff Writer— August 2026

A response to Peeping Tom’s column on the CCJ ruling in the Mohamed extradition case

Peeping Tom wants Guyana to read the Mohamed extradition ruling as proof that CCJ “noise” is political theatre. The columnist’s entire argument rests on a sleight of hand: conflating unanimity on the outcome of one case with unanimity on the integrity of the court that produced it. Those are not the same question, and treating them as one is either careless or convenient.

Yes — all seven judges agreed the Authority to Proceed was valid and the Mohameds’ appeal should fail. Nobody serious disputes that. But the “noise” was never about whether Azruddin and Nazar Mohamed’s extradition proceedings should continue. It is about what Justice Jamadar wrote in a leaked internal email: that the Mohamed extradition matter was one of two cases — alongside the Enriquez/Ramlogan trilogy — where he experienced CCJ President Anderson attempting to influence colleagues’ opinions “in an authoritative manner.” It is about Justice Eboe-Osuji’s allegation that Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions,” and his conspicuous absence — unexplained — from the delivery of the very judgment Peeping Tom now cites as vindication. It is about Anderson’s own remark, in a July 2025 judges’ meeting, that he did not see himself as “running a democracy.” 

A 257-page judgment gets forensic treatment; the email chain that prompted a majority of his own bench to accuse the CCJ President of running the court in an “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” manner gets zero mention.

None of that appears in the piece. That is not a close reading of the judgment — it is a studious avoidance of the scandal the judgment is now being used to launder.

The columnist’s own framing gives the game away. Procedural disagreement among judges, we’re told, is “normal” and “healthy.” Fine — nobody disputes that either. But Anderson’s decision to pull Eboe-Osuji from the D’Almada panel days after the same judge appeared, in the same attire, on the Robateau panel without incident; the CCJ’s own press office ignoring fifteen direct questions before issuing a Friday-night statement that answered none of them; the Heads of Judiciary’s joint statement on August 13 that expressed “grave concern” about the leak while declining to touch a single allegation against Anderson by name — none of that is a disagreement about “procedural highways.”

It is an institution closing ranks around its president while its own judges are on record accusing him of exactly the kind of interference Guyanese litigants are supposed to be protected from.

And Guyana has more at stake here than most. It was Guyana’s Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, arguing against the losing side before the very panel whose independence is now in question. It is Guyana’s TCL v Guyana precedent that sits at the center of the parallel D’Almada dispute over Bhagwansingh — a fight over whether nationals can sue their own state, decided by a panel Anderson is separately accused of trying to steer.

And it was Guyana’s Chief Justice who co-signed a joint, multi-jurisdiction statement on the CCJ’s credibility rather than issuing an independent one addressing Guyana’s direct stake — a choice that itself deserves scrutiny, not the silence it has received.

Calling any of this “political noise” requires either not knowing the contents of the leaked correspondence, or knowing it and hoping readers don’t. The verdict in Mohamed was unanimous.

The question of whether the man presiding over that court can be trusted to run it without leaning on his colleagues is not settled by that verdict — it is the question the verdict is now being used to bury.

— The Board