'Visa restrictions, acting appointments are modern pressures on judicial independence' — Justice Abel

(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.

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.