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Local Justice research stream holds dissemination workshop in Ghana - 14th May 2010
27 May 2010
Read our article and press clippings surrounding the event.
The majority of ordinary Ghanaians accept a court judgment as fair when both sides to the case are heard, and when the true facts have been duly established before an impartial judge. The fairness of a court’s proceedings is also measured by whether the other party accepts the verdict of the judge as the truth. These were among the findings of a study of accessible local justice released at Accra’s Fiesta Royale Hotel on 14 May. The study was conducted by the Ghana Center for Democratic Development and the Institute of Development Studies (UK) as a contribution to the Africa Power and Politics Programme.
Speaking at the workshop, Prof Richard Crook, the research stream leader, said that these ideas challenge the stereotype that ordinary people think of justice in purely “customary” or “traditional” terms.
“The Magistrates’ courts do offer the kind of justice people want and they are quite popular. The Magistrates’ courts are offering very informal kind of justice; sometimes they are in the local language. The judge is a facilitator, and helps the litigants to bring their cases out and offers the enforceable legal remedy that people want. As a result, they have thousands of cases to deal with all the time, and this poses a severe challenge to the legal system in Ghana”, he said.
Speaking at the workshop, the Executive Director of the Ghana Center for Democratic Development, Prof. Gyimah-Boadi said the APPP’s research agenda is driven by the observation that in much of Africa, things that ought to work, or indeed used to work, do not work at all or don’t work any more. The research is therefore aimed at “getting a better understanding of policies and programs that work in African countries and societies to help guide the development of similar policies, especially where such policies and programs are intended to work for the poor, the disadvantaged, in those societies.
”The research compared justice processes in the District Magistrates’ Courts, the CHRAJ District Mediation Services, and the Customary Land Secretariat’s Dispute Resolution Committees. It is trying to ascertain how Ghanaians assess the performance of these local justice institutions in terms of their, legitimacy, effectiveness and accessibility. The aim is to suggest policy guidelines for the justice sector that are rooted in local realities.
The workshop was well attended by a cross-section of those interested in improvements in the sector in Ghana, including legal practitioners, members of the bench, land administrators, donor partners and the media. It was covered the following day in the Daily Graphic newspaper.
By Theodore Dzeble
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