WHEN A JUDGE WRITES TO WARN A PRIME MINISTER: THE CCJ’S CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

WHEN A JUDGE WRITES TO WARN A PRIME MINISTER: THE CCJ’S CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

An internal reckoning at the Caribbean Court of Justice has reached the desk of a head of government

The dispute engulfing the Caribbean Court of Justice has stopped being an internal matter. It is now a regional one.

In a June 2026 email exchanged among his fellow judges of the CCJ, Justice Arif Bulkan — the Guyanese-born jurist who sits on the region’s court of last resort — made a statement that reaches well beyond the corridors of the tribunal’s Port of Spain headquarters. The very concerns that have led Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar to distrust the CCJ, Bulkan wrote, center on the risk of a single judge imposing a legal position contrary to that of the majority.

The appellate process, he said, exists specifically to guard against that kind of bias, and to preserve the integrity of the institution.

That sentence does two things at once. It confirms, from inside the court, that a sitting head of government has expressed distrust of the CCJ’s leadership. And it identifies, in a sitting judge’s own words, the precise institutional failure she is said to distrust: the concentration of authority in one office holder — CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson.

WHAT BULKAN TOLD HIS COLLEAGUES

Bulkan’s email was direct about where authority does and does not lie inside the court. The content of judgments, he wrote, is “very clearly a matter within our sole discretion as independent office holders.” He went further, noting that the appellate process “by its very definition requires a panel of more than one judge to consider an appeal and to independently come to a decision” — a structural safeguard that is undermined the moment one judge is able to determine, alone, who sits and who does not.

“…there are constructive ways of fulfilling such obligations, one of which includes being respectful of colleagues’ opinions, recognizing peers as equals and treating them accordingly and not dismissing their concerns…” — Justice Arif Bulkan

Read plainly, this is a judge of the region’s apex court telling its president, in writing, that he has fallen short of the standard collegiality requires.

THE ALLEGATIONS ON RECORD

Bulkan’s email sits inside a wider chain of correspondence among CCJ judges, exchanged amid escalating complaints against Justice Anderson. Those complaints — attributed to the judges raising them, and not verified findings of fact — include claims that Anderson unilaterally imposed a judicial dress code; accusations of “panel fixing”; and claims that he attempted to influence the outcome of cases before the court. A majority of the court’s judges, according to the same correspondence, have accused Anderson of running the regional court in a manner they characterized as “authoritarian” and “dictatorial.”

These are serious allegations, made by sitting judges against the president of their own court. They should be read as exactly that: allegations, contested and as yet unadjudicated by any outside body. But their source matters. This is not commentary from outside critics of the CCJ.

It is an internal reckoning, conducted in writing, by the judges responsible for the institution’s credibility.

WHY THIS IS NOW KAMLA PERSAD-BISSESSAR’S PROBLEM

The CCJ is not simply another regional body. It is headquartered in Trinidad and Tobago, and its credibility as the region’s apex appellate court rests in large part on the confidence of the governments — and the publics — it serves. When Bulkan frames his colleagues’ concerns as the same concerns driving Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s distrust of the court, he is not speculating.

He is describing an alignment between an internal judicial complaint and an external political one.That alignment is what turns this from a story about judicial temperament into a story about regional governance.

A prime minister’s confidence — or lack of it — in the CCJ is not a private opinion. It bears directly on the willingness of CARICOM member states to submit to the court’s appellate jurisdiction, on the perceived legitimacy of its rulings, and on the broader project of regional judicial integration that the CCJ was built to serve.

The Trinidad Express has sent questions via WhatsApp to Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar, seeking her response to the allegations against Justice Anderson and asking directly whether the claims raised by his fellow judges have affected her confidence in the CCJ’s leadership. As of this writing, no answer has been made public.

THE SILENCE IS ITSELF A FINDING

That silence should not be read as neutral. 592 Guardian readers will recall the CCJ’s own pattern in responding to scrutiny: when questions were first raised over Justice Eboe-Osuji’s removal from a Trinidad and Tobago/Jamaica/CARICOM panel earlier this year, the court ignored fifteen direct questions before issuing a statement — on a Friday night — that addressed none of the specific allegations put to it. (See our earlier coverage: “A Robe, a Ruling, and the Real Question at the CCJ.”)

A pattern is now visible: serious institutional questions are met first with silence, then with a statement that restates the court’s confidence in itself without engaging the substance of what was asked. Whether that pattern holds with Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar’s office remains to be seen.

WHAT GUYANA — AND THE REGION — SHOULD BE ASKING

Guyana has direct stakes in the CCJ’s integrity that extend beyond institutional propriety. The court’s earlier ruling in TCL v Guyana established that a private cross-border actor can hold a member state to account under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas — a precedent whose future application is itself entangled in the same panel dispute that produced this email chain. That is a separate matter, addressed at length in our earlier reporting, and it is not necessary to relitigate it here.

What is necessary is to ask, plainly, what happens next. Does a CARICOM head of government’s documented distrust of the CCJ’s leadership warrant a public response — to her own citizens, and to the citizens of every state that has submitted to the court’s jurisdiction? Does the CCJ’s own governance structure permit an independent review of a sitting president’s conduct, given that a majority of his fellow judges have raised the alarm in writing? And if the appellate process exists, as Justice Bulkan says, “to guard against” one judge overriding the rest — what safeguard exists when the judge in question is the one who presides over the entire court?

Those are not rhetorical questions. They are owed answers — by Justice Anderson, by the CCJ as an institution, and now, by Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar.

— The Board