MAGISTRATE Judy Latchman’s ruling this week in the Mohameds’ extradition saga offers a blunt civic lesson, one that the 280 Guyanese who recently completed the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance’s International Human Rights Law Certificate Course would immediately recognise. It forces Guyanese to confront a hard truth: in an extradition courtroom, the rights language we teach in human rights classes steps back, and the language of treaties takes a front row seat.

At the centre of Latchman’s decision is a simple clarification that Azruddin Mohamed finds “complicated”: extradition is a state‑to‑state obligation, and the individual “plays no part in the contractual agreement.” The moment the authority to proceed is signed and the treaty engaged, the usual script of citizen versus state is altered; what stands before the magistrate is not the immense wealth and political bluster of a father and son, but a diplomatic promise that Guyana has made to the United States.

This is why her ruling reads like a quiet masterclass in how extradition rearranges the legal furniture. In an ordinary criminal matter, the citizen stands in the centre of the room, rights blazing: innocent before a verdict is rendered, a fair hearing, freedom of movement, etc. In an extradition proceeding, those rights are still there, but now they’re pushed to the margins while the treaty sits squarely on the bench.

The Mohameds’ legal team did what any defence in their position would do: they built a rights‑heavy case around threats to life, liberty, family, fair hearing and freedom of movement. Taken on their own terms, these are compelling arguments, the kind that in another forum might derail a prosecution or at least slow it to a crawl. Here, however, they ran into a wall carefully constructed by Parliament and fortified by the higher courts.

Extradition, as designed in Guyana’s law, is not a free‑ranging inquiry into whether a citizen’s rights are secure. It is a narrow tunnel. The question placed before the magistrate is technical and tightly framed: has the requesting state followed the treaty and the statute; is there an offence that matches; is there enough material to justify sending the person to stand trial elsewhere? Everything else, including the broad constitutional complaints, is treated as noise.

This is the real sting in Magistrate Latchman’s reasoning. Once the extradition machinery is engaged, the size of the bank account and political swagger of Azruddin count for nothing. He cannot argue about his fate in moral or political terms; he can only contest the gears and bolts of the process, the validity of the authority to proceed, the sufficiency of the documents, and the alignment between the charges and domestic offences. Beyond that, he is, in effect, an object in an international bargain.

Put bluntly, Azruddin stops being the justice system’s primary concern and will soon become cargo in a diplomatic exchange. The “client” in Magistrate Latchman’s courtroom on Wednesday was not the Mohameds, but the treaty between Guyana and the United States. The magistrate’s loyalty, as she correctly envisioned it, runs first to Parliament’s design and to the executive’s decision to honour that treaty, and only second, and indirectly, to the men in the dock.

This is not just Magistrate Latchman’s personal philosophy; it is the legal architecture she has inherited. The 2009 amendments to the extradition regime deliberately narrowed the scope of arguments that can be presented in an extradition hearing and instructed the country’s local courts to interpret certain protections as inherent to the treaty relationship, rather than as matters for each prisoner to litigate. Parliament chose to trust the framework of state‑to‑state assurances over the individualised plea of the accused.

The Troy Thomas case locked this model in. The High Court was asked whether this arrangement offends the Constitution, whether it hollows out the right to liberty and due process. It answered in the state’s favour, effectively telling lower courts that the balance between treaty obedience and individual contest has already been struck, and that extradition hearings are not the place to reopen it. Locked between the 2009 amendments and Troy Thomas, magistrates like Latchman now operate in a corridor where the treaty comes first and the citizen comes second.

Seen through this lens, Magistrate Latchman’s recital of the catalogue of rights said to be under threat takes on a different tone. She listed them calmly and carefully, then placed them to one side. Some, she said, have already been put to rest by higher authority. Others belong not to the courtroom at all, but to the political directorate as matters to be taken up between Georgetown and Washington, not between Mohamed and the magistrate.

What remains is a stark picture. In an extradition proceeding, the Guyanese citizen is no longer the justice system’s central figure. The treaty and the executive arm are. The citizens’ rights are not erased, but they are placed in parentheses, reserved, postponed, outsourced to an American courtroom or to some future Constitutional challenge. For now, as Azruddin contemplates a one‑way flight to Florida, he stands as a reminder of how quickly the language of rights can shrink once the state decides that its first duty is to another state, and not to the person in the dock.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.