On July 29, 2016, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) ruled that damages for defamation claims must be awarded in accordance with the law, practice, and traditions of the state in which the injury occurred and cannot be assessed on the basis of a comparison of awards made in other Caribbean territories where prevailing socio-economic conditions, including GDP, are different. According to the press release, the case concerned an article and two caricatures published in the Kaieteur News in 2000, which “refer[ed] to Dr Ramsahoye in exceptionally disparaging terms.”  Ramsahoye sued successfully for defamation and was awarded G$4.5 million in damages. The appellate court increased the amount of damages to G$15million, thus accepting Ramsahoye’s claim that the initial amount had been too low. The CCJ set aside the appellate judgment, noting that “there was no justification for the Court of Appeal to interfere with the trial judge’s award as he had not erred in the application of legal principle nor made an award that was inordinately low. He had taken account of aggravating or punitive factors in making his global award of G4.5million.” The CCJ further elaborated that “[a]n award of damages is fundamentally a species of what used to be called ‘local actions’ in that the award is a function of the place and the extent to which the defamed person’s reputation was injured. . . . In this case, the publications took place in Guyana and there is no evidence of publication in any other Caribbean jurisdiction. But even if they had been published elsewhere in the Caribbean the ubiquity of the defamatory publication would not by virtue of that fact justify an award of damages that reflected awards in these jurisdictions. Damages are always conditioned by, inter alia, the prevailing socio-economic circumstances in the country in which the assessment is being made. The damages must therefore be assessed in accordance with the law, practice and traditions of Guyana and cannot simply be analogized to awards in other territories of the Caribbean where socio- economic conditions, including GDP, are different.”