We describe the two RICH detectors of the CERES electron pair spectrometer at the CERN SPS which are used for electron identification and, in conjunction with a novel silicon drift detector, for tracking in pp, pA and AA collisions. The RICH detectors are operated at a high γth ⋍ 32 (CH4 at 1 atm.) and are thus rather insensitive to hadrons. The UV-detectors are multistep counters with a multiwire chamber as the last stage. They are operated at gains of 2–4 × 105 using a mixture of He + 6% C2H6 (or CH4) + TMAE. The two UV-detectors are equipped with 53 800 (48 400) square pads. The front end electronics consists of modules with 256 (121) channels, based on a 64-channel charge-sensitive preamplifier VLSI chip. The total readout time is 280 (1600) μs per event. Subsets of the pad data are used as input to a fast trigger processor selecting events with at least two separated electron rings. The trigger achieved an enrichment factor of ∼ 100 in proton-induced interactions, and a factor of ∼3 in 32SAu collisions. The RICH detectors perform very close to their design values. We observe clean Cherenkov rings with an average number of 11.2 (12.5) photons/ring. This is consistent with the calculated value N0 = 131 (75) cm−1 within the systematical error of about 10%. The spatial resolutions of 1.0 and 0.8 mrad (rms) for individual photons are dominated by chromatic aberration and in very good agreement with theoretical expectations.