Valentine’s Day: Love letter for justice
A chance encounter with a high-flying Air Force Officer at a colleague’s birthday party on Valentine’s Day has inspired this week’s rant.
Hang on and hold your breath, as this is not a salacious tale of deceit between hapless wannabe lovers.
It is about something more serious and important: justice delivery in Ghana.
My colleague’s guest, an impeccably dressed Air Force Officer, whose general disposition was, at first, engaging, infectious and enchanting, suddenly changed and took a massive dive into frustration, despair and unrelenting anger when the conversation metamorphosed into legal matters.
The officer’s story of his own encounter with the legal system really affected me because it was a catalogue of institutional deficiencies.
Law
Law, in its glory, is supposed to be the bastion of fairness and the last refuge of the oppressed.
However, these lofty aspirational values have given way to a system of deep-seated faults which challenge public confidence and the very fabric on which the law is built – the rule of law.
Obviously, a newspaper column such as this cannot, even at the best of times, unravel all the problems bedevilling the legal system; nonetheless, that is no excuse to jump ship.
Without a scintilla of doubt, and there are no brownie points for getting it right, one of the major problems of the system is the inordinate delays in the administration of justice.
Court cases, both civil and criminal, are notoriously slow, expensive and uncertain for most Ghanaians.
They drag on for many years, frustrating and drowning litigants along the way.
There are land cases that take 20 or more years to complete.
In the criminal sphere, where there are constitutional guarantees to ensure trials within a reasonable time, the outcomes are no better.
The maxim ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ is very apposite in the Ghanaian system.
Some of the causes of all the inordinate delays in the administration of justice include, but are not limited to, an inadequacy of judges, poor and ineffective case management regimes, exploitation of procedural loopholes by some opportunistic practitioners, poor and often inadequate facilities for the efficient administration of justice, archaic procedural rules and the lack of application of technology to hasten the court experience.
But one of the major culprits in the delays is that adjournments have become ‘de rigueur’ and par for the course.
Access
Another area that contributes to the canker of delay is the problem of access to justice. To litigate in Ghana, especially in the civil side of things, is not for the faint-hearted or man of straw. Lawyers’ fees are beyond the reach of most ordinary
Ghanaians, let alone the high filing fees and transport costs that often arise from the many times a litigant must attend court before a case concludes in Ghana.
The Legal Aid Commission, which was established to offer legal services to the poor, is overwhelmed with applications and cannot fulfil its mandate, largely due to the inadequacy of funding.
In looking for solutions to some of these problems, an area that can be successfully utilised is technology.
Records of court proceedings are very difficult to obtain, often because most courts, especially the lower courts and courts in rural areas, are not adequately equipped to record matters.
It has taken the best part of two weeks for a colleague to receive a record of court proceedings for use in an application.
The way court proceedings are captured is also a major contributory factor resulting in delays.
There are countless occasions where lawyers in full flow, arguing cases, are stopped in their tracks simply because the typists are not coping with the speed of delivery.
A cross-examination that can take at most one hour finally concludes in three to four hours.
Deployment of modern techniques for capturing court activities will massively improve the system.
Regarding access, an increase in the budget of the Legal Aid Commission, coupled with aggressive recruitment of lawyers with competitive salaries, will go a long way to alleviate the human resource element.
Leveraging technology in a number of areas such as the filing and service of court processes, the encouragement of virtual hearings, and the revision of court rules and procedures (including simplifying the rules, some of which are complex and not user-friendly) will be helpful.
Time has come to usher litigation into the digital age and to achieve that, we must aggressively deploy technology to achieve full digitisation of all court processes.
Until then, the problem of delay will persist.
The writer is a lawyer.
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