Christie Justus Law — Research Papers
Working papers, 2026
Numbered CJL-WP 2026/01 onward. Each is a complete article with abstract, keywords, tables of cases and legislation and a bibliography. Citations follow OSCOLA.
CJL-WP 2026/01
Domesticating the FATF Standards in Guyana's Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act
Small states that live under mutual evaluation legislate in a particular way. This paper asks what kind of law results when a statute is written to an assessor's methodology, on the assessor's calendar and in the assessor's vocabulary. It answers by reading Guyana's Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act 2009, its eight amending Acts and the Guyana Compliance Commission Act 2023 against the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force's fourth-round Mutual Evaluation Report of 2024. The argument is that, in such a state, compliance is itself a mode of legislation: the Recommendation supplies the outline, the assessment criteria supply the sections, the on-site date supplies the deadline, and Parliament supplies the form. What results is technically strong and structurally derivative, a statute amended in waves that follow the evaluation cycle rather than any domestic criminology. Alvarez's account of international organisations as law-makers, Koh's transnational legal process and the Chayeses' managerial model of compliance are each put to that record, and each is found incomplete for a state with no vote in the standard-setting body. The 2024 evaluation — technical ratings largely compliant, effectiveness ratings largely moderate, no conviction for money laundering — is then read as the predictable output of the process described, and three lessons are drawn from the drafting chair, on offence design, supervisory institutions and commencement.
September 2026 · 27 pages · 121 footnotes · PDF
Keywords: money laundering; FATF; Guyana; CFATF; legislative drafting; soft law; mutual evaluation; transnational legal process
Naomi Eglantine Christie, ‘Compliance as Legislation: Domesticating the FATF Standards in Guyana's Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act’ (2026) Christie Justus Law Research Paper CJL-WP 2026/01 <https://christiejustuslaw.com/research/cjl-wp-2026-01-compliance-as-legislation.html>
CJL-WP 2026/02
Offence Architecture, Intimate-Image Offences and the Rights Balance
Guyana's Cybercrime Act 2018 was enacted after a two-year passage dominated by objection to a sedition clause that was excised on the night the Bill passed. This paper asks whether the Act that survived strikes a defensible balance between the suppression of the harms it was written to suppress and the constitutional guarantee of expression. It argues that the Act contains two architectures stitched together. The first, in sections 3 to 13, is a computer-misuse core drafted around the integrity of systems and data on the pattern of the Convention on Cybercrime; it is technically sound. The second, in sections 14 to 19, is a set of content and conduct offences drafted around harm to persons and to the polity, and there the rights balance is struck unevenly. Section 16, the intimate-image offence, is consent-based, fills a real gap in Guyanese law and survives the de Freitas proportionality test. Sections 18 and 19 are drawn broadly enough to attract the vagueness objection the Caribbean Court of Justice sustained in McEwan and to collide with the principle in Hector that those in public office must remain open to criticism. Each section is read from the Gazette text against the Constitution, the treaty it follows, and the statutes of Jamaica and the United Kingdom. A narrowing construction of sections 18 and 19 is available now and the courts should adopt it; targeted amendment is a better course than the promised repeal. Part III's investigative powers presuppose safeguards the Data Protection Act 2023 was written to supply, and that Act has not been commenced.
September 2026 · 31 pages · 124 footnotes · PDF
Keywords: cybercrime; Guyana; freedom of expression; intimate images; vagueness; proportionality; Convention on Cybercrime; data protection
Naomi Eglantine Christie, ‘The Cybercrime Act 2018 of Guyana: Offence Architecture, Intimate-Image Offences and the Rights Balance’ (2026) Christie Justus Law Research Paper CJL-WP 2026/02 <https://christiejustuslaw.com/research/cjl-wp-2026-02-the-cybercrime-act-2018-of-guyana.html>
CJL-WP 2026/03
The Law of Armed Conflict from a Small-State Perspective
This paper asks what the law of armed conflict is for, seen from a state that does not expect to fight. I argue that the three cardinal rules of the conduct of hostilities — distinction, proportionality and precaution — are for such a state a shield rather than a set of instructions to its own forces, and that this difference of position shows in what the state wants from the law. It shows in the sources the small state prefers: it ratifies universally and entire, and it reads the customary-law study as its library where the great power reads its own manual. It shows in the way the small state implements, thinly and through statutes applied from the colonial period, because implementation is priced against the expectation of use, so that the gap which results is one of capacity rather than of compliance. And it shows in the use the small state makes of the law adjacent to the law of armed conflict: the Charter's prohibition of force and the International Court's provisional-measures practice become, for the weaker party, a form of precaution before the attack. Guyana is the case study, through its implementation record, the Caribbean Community's practice under the Arms Trade Treaty, and the Court's Orders of 1 December 2023 and 1 May 2025 in Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899 (Guyana v Venezuela), which I read as the peacetime analogue of the precautionary rule. The merits of that case are pending and nothing in the paper predicts them. It closes with what a modern Geneva Conventions Act should contain and the institutions that should go with it.
September 2026 · 25 pages · 117 footnotes · PDF
Keywords: law of armed conflict; international humanitarian law; distinction; proportionality; precaution; small states; Guyana; provisional measures; Guyana v Venezuela; Arms Trade Treaty; CARICOM
Naomi Eglantine Christie, ‘Distinction, Proportionality and Precaution: The Law of Armed Conflict from a Small-State Perspective’ (2026) Christie Justus Law Research Paper CJL-WP 2026/03 <https://christiejustuslaw.com/research/cjl-wp-2026-03-distinction-proportionality-and-precaution.html>
CJL-WP 2026/04
The Council of Europe Framework Convention Route
The Commonwealth Caribbean completed two regional frameworks for the governance of artificial intelligence between December 2025 and July 2026, and no CARICOM state has enacted a statute on the subject. This paper argues that the question the region is asking — which model law to adopt — is the wrong one. The binding constraint on legislative effectiveness in these states is not enactment but commencement. The record is verified: Guyana's Data Protection Act 2023, uncommenced three years after assent; the Judicial Review Act 2010, brought into force only after a court order in 2018; a constitutional Human Rights Commission never operationalised; and the partly proclaimed data-protection statutes of the region. On that record the scarcest legislative resource is the commencement order, and the institution a statute presupposes. An AI statute modelled on the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act, which runs on notifying authorities, notified bodies, market surveillance and conformity assessment, would produce a second uncommenced Act. The paper reads the Council of Europe Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence closely and argues that it is the fitting international anchor for a small state: open to accession by non-member states; principles-based and cast as obligations of result; directed at rights and remedies that map onto a supreme-law constitution and a common-law judiciary ending in the Caribbean Court of Justice; and light enough to attach its duties to bodies that already exist. It proposes accession, a short domestic Act, practice directions of the courts and, before all three, commencement of the data-protection statute.
September 2026 · 27 pages · 121 footnotes · PDF
Keywords: artificial intelligence; Council of Europe Framework Convention; EU Artificial Intelligence Act; Guyana; CARICOM; commencement; data protection; legal transplants; Caribbean Court of Justice
Naomi Eglantine Christie, ‘Regulating Artificial Intelligence in a Small Commonwealth Caribbean State: The Council of Europe Framework Convention Route’ (2026) Christie Justus Law Research Paper CJL-WP 2026/04 <https://christiejustuslaw.com/research/cjl-wp-2026-04-regulating-artificial-intelligence-in-a-small-commonwealth-caribb.html>
CJL-WP 2026/05
The 1899 Award, the 1966 Geneva Agreement and the Current Proceedings
The case concerning the Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899 (Guyana v Venezuela) is under deliberation at the International Court of Justice. The public hearings on the merits closed on 11 May 2026; as at 4 September 2026 no judgment has been delivered and no date of delivery has been announced. This paper does not predict the outcome. It asks a prior question: what kind of instrument is the Geneva Agreement of 17 February 1966, and what does its operation between 1966 and 2018 show about how a small state uses international law? I argue that the Geneva Agreement is not a settlement but an agreement about the means of settlement, that it contains a binding delegation to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and that its long operation is the clearest modern record of a state without leverage choosing the tribunal, because the tribunal is the one room in which it and its neighbour are the same size. I read the proceedings so far as three tests of that choice: consent (the Judgment of 18 December 2020), the absent third party (the Judgment of 6 April 2023), and the peacetime shield of provisional measures (the Orders of 1 December 2023 and 1 May 2025). The questions the merits raise are then stated and left unanswered: finality under Article XIII of the 1897 Treaty, the recognised grounds of nullity, the 1905 demarcation and six decades of conduct, the effect of the Geneva Agreement itself, and the exclusion of post-1966 events. The method is documentary. Nothing here rests on anything but the Court's own texts, the parties' pleadings and verbatim records, and the instruments themselves, and where the parties disagree both positions are given in their own words.
September 2026 · 28 pages · 130 footnotes · PDF
Keywords: Guyana; Venezuela; International Court of Justice; Geneva Agreement 1966; Arbitral Award of 1899; nullity of arbitral awards; consent to jurisdiction; Monetary Gold; provisional measures; small states
Naomi Eglantine Christie, ‘Guyana, Venezuela and the International Court of Justice: The 1899 Award, the 1966 Geneva Agreement and the Current Proceedings’ (2026) Christie Justus Law Research Paper CJL-WP 2026/05 <https://christiejustuslaw.com/research/cjl-wp-2026-05-guyana-venezuela-and-the-international-court-of-justice.html>