By NAN Staff Writer, NewsAmericas Now

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Mon. August 10, 2026: Five of the CCJ – Caribbean Court of Justice’s six sitting judges have accused the court’s president, Justice Winston Anderson, of running the region’s highest court in an “authoritarian” and “dictatorial” manner, according to internal correspondence obtained by the Trinidad Express in a bombshell report. Among the specific allegations: that Anderson attempted to improperly influence the outcome of the case that dismissed Guyana Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s final appeal against U.S. extradition proceedings.

Justice Peter Jamadar, in a detailed email to fellow judges, wrote that he experienced “an attempt to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner” specifically in “the Mohamed vs MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter.” Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji went further, alleging Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions” in a separate case, and said Jamadar’s experience “was not unique.”

Mohamed’s office responds

Mohamed’s own office has now formally weighed in. In a statement issued Sunday, the Office of the Guyana Leader of the Opposition called the revelations “deeply disturbing” and demanded “full transparency and an appropriate independent examination” of what occurred during deliberations in his case. The statement emphasized that the concerns come from a majority, not a lone dissenting judge, and posed a direct set of questions it says “demand credible answers”: Were attempts made to influence judges who disagreed with the president? Why did a clear majority of judicial colleagues reportedly object to the timing and manner in which the decision was announced? Were established conventions departed from? And did any of this affect the integrity or perceived fairness of the process?

“This is bigger than any individual litigant, judge, government or political party,” the statement reads. “A court that demands accountability, independence and adherence to the rule of law from governments must hold itself to those same standards.”

The CCJ unanimously dismissed Mohamed’s appeal on July 29, clearing the way for U.S. extradition proceedings against him and his father, businessman Nazar Mohamed, to resume before Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman on September 3. The ruling, delivered by Justice Denys Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson,” was presented publicly as a clean, unanimous decision.

Jamadar’s email suggests the reality inside the court’s deliberations may have been considerably less settled. Justice Eboe-Osuji, in correspondence cited directly in the opposition’s statement, described being told the court’s president intended to announce the Mohamed decision “at a time and in a manner in which a clear majority of his colleagues had very strongly communicated to him as inappropriate.” If a sitting judge is alleging the court’s president attempted to pressure colleagues who disagreed with him specifically on this case, it raises a legitimate question the ruling’s public unanimity was never meant to answer: how much genuine disagreement existed among the judges before that unanimity was reached, and did it reflect independent judicial reasoning or institutional pressure.

A crisis two decades in the making

The allegations land at a particularly difficult moment for an institution that has spent more than 20 years trying to convince the wider Caribbean it deserves full trust. The CCJ was established by agreement in February 2001 and inaugurated in April 2005, created explicitly to replace the British Privy Council as the region’s final court of appeal and complete a long-delayed step toward full judicial independence.

Yet more than two decades later, only five of CARICOM’s 14 full member states, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, and St. Lucia, have actually made the CCJ their court of last resort. The rest, including Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the OECS states, continue to send their final appeals to London. Jamaica’s House of Representatives voted to adopt the CCJ back in 2015 and still hasn’t finished the process. Antigua and Barbuda held a referendum on the question in 2018; voters rejected it.

Proponents of the CCJ have long argued that lingering attachment to the Privy Council reflects colonial habit more than genuine concern, a reluctance to fully trust a court of the region’s own making. This week’s revelations, and now Mohamed’s own formal demand for an independent examination, complicate that argument considerably.

Justice Eboe-Osuji, in his email, captured the irony directly: “There is, of course, a surreal problem in all this. It is that an apex court who decides questions as the final arbiter of the rule of law and democracy according to the rule of law would labour so badly under a leader that does not believe in the ethos of democracy in his own leadership.”

Neither the CCJ nor Justice Anderson has publicly responded to the allegations.

NewsAmericasNow will continue following developments at the CCJ and their impact on the Mohamed extradition case.

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