A dirty scandal has hit the Caribbean Community’s top appeals court — and it could have serious implications for countries which have been reluctant to sign on to it, officials said this week.

The Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) is making headlines because several judges have accused court President Winston Anderson of not only being increasingly authoritarian but have also complained that he has been trying to influence final court verdicts.

The region has been made aware of the growing disunity in the two decades-old court because some one on the inside leaked a damning string of email threads to the Trinidad Express newspaper which published them on Sunday, setting off a string of negative reactions this week.

The revelations have come just a week after the main opposition People’s National Party (PNP) in Jamaica reached out to the government to restart talks about the island becoming a republic. Progress on Jamaica joining Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, and Dominica as republics has been stalled because the current administration in Jamaica does not want to sign on to the CCJ, fearing its judges will struggle to resist external influences because they live in the region and regional politicians have access to them. The bar in several other regional jurisdictions have also in the past expressed similar reservations so there has been very little effort to increase the number of countries which send appeals to Trinidad for deliberation.

So far, only Guyana, Barbados, Belize, Dominica and St. Lucia are signatories to the court’s appeals section. The others in the 15-nation bloc depend on final judgments from the British Privy Council.

Detailing their concerns about Jamaica Chief Justice Anderson, Trinidadian Justice Peter Jamadar and Chile Eboe-Osuji from Nigeria were forthright in expressing their concerns about developments at the court.

Eboe-Osuji was particularly brutal on Anderson, saying that in a recent case for final ruling, “Winston tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions that guided how decisions are rendered when judges disagree. In the Mohameds’ (Guyana extradition case) case, it was stunning to hear Winston pointedly inform us that he was going to announce a decision of the court at a time and in a manner in which a clear majority of his colleagues had very strongly communicated to him as inappropriate.”

Jamadar on the other hand also lashed out at the chief justice, noting that in the Mohamed extradition matter, “what I experienced was an attempt to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner. What I experienced was far beyond anything that I have ever experienced in all my years as a judicial officer sitting on appellate courts. Which experience, I may add, was also expressed by other colleagues who were present at this meeting.”

Jamadar also touched on Anderson’s management style, noting “emerging or creeping patterns of anti-democratic approaches to us as judges of the court in matters that directly and indirectly impact our core functions. I raise this inconvenient and uncomfortable concern, certainly for me because I care deeply about this institution that is the CCJ and believe that we ALL also do so.”

For its part, the court issued a statement without directly refuting or commenting on the allegations by Anderson’s colleagues. It said it was mindful of the issues which have been presented without context, background and an appreciation of the nature of deliberations.

“For that reason, the court wishes to reaffirm that the judges of the CCJ remain committed to the tenets of judicial conduct enshrined in the United Nations Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct—independence, impartiality, integrity, propriety, equality, competence, and diligence. The CCJ remains committed to providing accessible fair and efficient justice for the people and states of the Caribbean Community,” the statement said.

Anderson had served the region as the attorney for the Guyana-based Caricom secretariat for several years. The latest row with his own panel of judges is the second major incident involving him in recent months.

The New York-based Caribbean Guyana Institute for Democracy accused him of collaborating with the Guyana government to force out the head of Guyana judiciary in favor of a colleague favored by the government. He has not as yet commented on such allegations.