Many people are pleased when President John Dramani Mahama nominated seven justices to the Supreme Court, including several well-known judges who had been marginalised for years due to their apparent lack of political affiliation.
In the chapter that describes how Akufo-Addo nominated a judge to the Supreme Court in order to placate a departing judge, readers of my book, "The President Ghana Never Got," would have noticed one such name.
President Akufo-Addo disregarded Court of Appeal justices, including the Learnt Justice Dennis Dominic Adjei, who has served at the Court of Appeal since 2010, when he used his appointment authority.
Being knighted by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, Sir Dennis—as his students and attorneys call him—has distinguished himself worldwide in addition to being one of Ghana's top judicial experts, having co-authored a seventh law textbook and written six other important ones. In July 2022, he was chosen to serve a six-year term as a judge of the African Court of Justice. Additionally, he is a member of the International Criminal Court's nine-person advisory group. For the 2022–2023 academic year, Justice Dennis Dominic Adjei, a member of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, was chosen to serve as the Senior Judges member for Common Law Jurisdictions at the Inns of Court and Advanced Legal Institute of the University of London.
Akufo-Addo selected an NPP parliamentary candidate to the high court in the 2016 election and promoted him to the Supreme Court two years later, while justices such as Sir Dennis were occupying the Court of Appeal.
This appointment was meant to placate a departing Supreme Court judge who had been let down by Akufo-Addo, first with the Chief Justice job, as I disclose in my book mentioned above. After instructing the judge to prepare for his nomination as Speaker of Parliament in Akufo-Addo's second term, the President subsequently abandoned him.
In light of this, the selection of judges like Sir Dennis seems to rectify a clear mistake. Therefore, I have no problem with the seven candidates that have been proposed to join the Supreme Court. I am not familiar with some of them, therefore I am unable to judge their appropriateness.
However, the politics and optics do not seem to be particularly neat, especially in light of the current political debates.
In essence, some have contended that the Supreme Court has an excessive number of justices. Since my lay perspective is skewed towards the expeditious administration of justice, which may depend on the number of judges present to hear cases, I leave it to the legal professionals to educate us.
The suspended Chief Justice's desire to add justices to the Supreme Court, which many opposed due to the poor process she used, may mean that the numbers alone do not amount to political stuffing of the court. Even if the seven judges are not a problem, certain political statements and the controversial timing of the selections leave one perplexed.
For the time being, all that can be hoped for is that the men and women who hold the most sacred seats in our nation will serve honourably, administering justice in accordance with the law and their conscience.
We shall all submit to the legal system for justice until we are instructed to get firearms, machetes, and cudgels to protect ourselves when we are attacked. However, if a people are unable to turn to the legal system for justice, they turn to other options, which may not even be viable for the political elite.
The president who chooses our judges was a regular person until the people granted him authority, therefore let them serve the people. Today, the district magistrate cannot hire a cleaner, yet less than a year ago, that powerful individual could reject the petition against the Chief Justice without having to explain to anybody.
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