THE past few days have offered a case study in how a legitimate institutional concern can be hijacked for partisan ends.
On one hand, the Heads of Judiciary of seven Caribbean jurisdictions were right to sound the alarm over the leak of internal Caribbean Court of Justice correspondence.
Confidentiality among deliberating judges is not bureaucratic nicety, it is the seal that lets judges argue, disagree, and change their minds without fear that private exchanges will become public ammunition.
Whoever leaked that correspondence to the Trinidad Express did real damage to that principle, and the region’s collective judicial statement was the right response to it.
What has happened since the leak, though, is far more troubling than the leak itself. Within days of the CCJ’s July 29 ruling dismissing Azruddin Mohamed’s appeal and clearing the way for his extradition to the United States, social media platforms tied to Mohamed’s political organisation began treating the leaked correspondence not as evidence of ordinary institutional friction, but as supposed proof that the ruling against him was corrupt. That is a serious conflation, and it deserves to be named as one.
Courts everywhere argue internally. Judges dissent, clash over case management, and disagree about administration; that is the ordinary texture of collegial adjudication, not scandal. The judiciary heads’ own statement made a point of separating internal disagreement from the validity of any particular judgment.
Yet, Team Mohamed’s Facebook page, alongside the Office of the Leader of the Opposition, the Public Accountability Network, and Hana Mohamed, have worked hard to blur that line, publishing photographs of CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson meeting Guyanese officials as though that alone proved political capture, while leaving out that Justice Anderson met opposition figures, including Mohamed himself, just as readily.
The timing alone should give any fair-minded observer pause. A campaign portraying the region’s highest court as compromised, launched in the immediate aftermath of a ruling against the very people running that campaign, is not whistleblowing. It is retaliation dressed up as accountability.
None of this means the underlying correspondence should be waved away, or that genuine questions about leadership and governance inside the CCJ don’t deserve answers through proper institutional channels. But there is a wide gulf between demanding transparency and manufacturing a narrative of judicial corruption to serve a fugitive’s public relations strategy.
The region’s judiciary heads drew that line correctly: real concern about the breach, real restraint on the merits. The Caribbean public, and its media, would do well to hold that same line, and to recognise a coordinated smear campaign for exactly what it is, rather than mistake it for a reckoning.