(Kaieteur News) – Modern threats to judicial independence rarely present as explicit commands or direct violence. Instead, they operate by subtly “arranging the atmosphere” to teach judges which decisions carry high personal and institutional costs, prominent legal scholar Professor Justice Courtney Abel warned regional jurists.
Delivering an address on current tensions between judicial independence and the rule of law in the Caribbean, Justice Abel used a series of real-world pressure points, including travel restrictions, prolonged acting appointments, and emerging technologies, to question whether judges across the Commonwealth Caribbean remain the true authors of their rulings or are being reduced to mere scribes.
Professor Justice Courtney Abel
His keynote remarks came against the immediate backdrop of an incident on Saturday, September 19, 2026, where High Court Judge Gino Persaud was prevented from boarding a flight in Miami en route to the summit after his U.S. visa was placed under review.
Justice Abel framed the airport disruption as a vivid demonstration of how collateral power operates in small postcolonial states. Justice Persaud had previously presided over contentious tax cases involving high-profile figures, rendering rulings adverse to the Guyanese state that drew public criticism from government leadership.
While acknowledging that no foreign power is required to explain its immigration decisions, Justice Abel asserted that timing and context cannot be ignored.
“A sanction need not announce its name,” Justice Abel stated. “When an unexplained exercise of foreign executive power materially affects a serving judge after politically sensitive decisions, at what point does a private immigration matter become a public question of judicial independence?”
He cautioned that the true impact extends beyond any single jurist: “The question is larger than Justice Persaud. It concerns the judge who comes next. What message does the unexplained closing of one gate send to every judge who must later approach another?”
Drawing on his personal experience as a former judge in Belize, Justice Abel described how subtle pressures compromise judicial autonomy long before a formal constitutional breach occurs.
“Power does not always command. More often, it arranges the atmosphere,” he noted. “It may prolong an acting appointment until expectation and insecurity merge. It may criticise a judgment without confronting its reasons. It may alter security arrangements… No direction is given. No threat is recorded.”
“The old assault was visible. The judge was removed. The court was closed. The judgment was ignored,” Justice Abel added. “The modern assault may leave no fingerprints. It may never tell the judge what to decide. It may merely teach the judge what decisions are costly.” Turning to internal constitutional vulnerabilities, Justice Abel targeted Guyana’s decades-long failure to substantively fill its top judicial posts, the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice. Article 127 of Guyana’s Constitution mandates agreement between the President and the Leader of the Opposition for substantive appointments, a design that has generated a 20-year stalemate.
Justice Abel characterised this reliance on long-term acting roles as “permanent temporariness”…a contradiction that undermines institutional security. He questioned whether heads of judiciary can remain fully secure while political actors hold the power to decide if their appointments will ever be finalised, urging regional leaders to move away from inherited adversarial politics toward conciliatory, “truly Caribbean” frameworks for consensus.
Justice Abel further invoked the postcolonial Caribbean concept of freedom as “self-authorship”…the capacity of a people and its institutions to write their own destinies rather than act out scripts written by external actors. Within this framework, judicial authorship demands that judgments remain strictly bounded by law, reason, and evidence…free from political, foreign, or digital interference.
He closed with a warning against the uncritical adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence in chambers, cautioning that surrendering judicial reasoning to automated tools represents a voluntary forfeiture of the pen.
“AI may assist judgment. It must never become its hidden author,” Justice Abel concluded. “For when the judgment is complete and the final story told, the judge must remain its author…and never merely its scribe.”
Source: Kaieteur News
