GHANA'S PUBLIC TRIBUNALS: AN EXPERIMENT IN REVOLUTIONARY JUSTICE

Abstract

IN A RADIO BROADCAST to the nation on Tuesday, 5 January 19 8 2, the Chairman of Ghana's Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC), Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, announced that his revolutionary government was about to establish what he described as 'People's Tribunals'. They were to 'act on the basis of investigations scrupulously conducted and [with] evidence properly assembled', but were 'not [to be] fettered by technical rules that in the past have perverted the course of justice and enabled criminals to go free'. Nevertheless, this new system was not to 'replace [the] regular courts', but neither were the latter to 'superintend [their] operations'. Instead, what the Chairman envisaged was a dualistic criminal court system that would 'respect the boundaries of one another', and it would be left 'for the people to decide the correctness or otherwise of the judgment of the two systems'.l The Public Tribunals were to be a powerful instrument for pursuing the 'revolutionary' goals of what the Chairman described was a 'Holy War'.2 Almost eleven years later, on the 7 July 1993, as part of the new constitutional arrangements of Ghana's Fourth Republic, this dualistic criminal court system came to an end.3 According to the Courts Act of 6 July 1993, all courts in Ghana were to be incorporated into one system under the control of the country's Supreme Court and the experiment with popular justice 'not fettered by technical rules' came to an end. By the middle of 1995, with little fanfare, Regional, Circuit and Community Tribunals were indeed made part of the Fourth Republic's judicial system.4 Much of their personnel came from the ranks of former Public Tribunal officials, and as a further important concession to 'popular justice' many of these panel members were community members without specific