‘The Court is not a mercy chamber’ - Godfred Dame

The Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Godfred Dame, has urged Ghanaians to understand the rule of the courts in the justice delivery in Ghana to avoid chastising it unnecessarily.

Dame explained that the courts deliver justice based on the evidence before it and not based on compassion for the people involved.

"It ought to be

Read full articleunderstood that it is the duty of the courts to administer justice according to law. The court is not a mercy chamber to serve justice based on sympathy or affection," he said at the 2022 Ghana Bar Annual Conference in Ho.

Dame, who made these remarks while reacting to ex-President John Dramani Mahama’s criticism of the judiciary, added that he is surprised lawyers of the opposition National Democratic Congress are not correcting the former president.

Ex-President Mahama, at a forum held for lawyers of the National Democratic Congress on August 28, lamented that the judiciary has a ‘broken image under the current leadership of the Chief Justice.

He said Ghanaians were losing trust in the judiciary, owing to some of its unanimous decisions, a situation he explains as dangerous to the country’s democracy.

He stated that it would only take a new Chief Justice to chart a path to regaining public trust in the judiciary.

“There is therefore an urgent need for the Ghanaian judiciary to work to win the trust and confidence of the citizenry and erase the widely held perception of hostility and political bias in legal proceedings at the highest courts of the land.

“Unfortunately, we have no hope that the current leadership of our judiciary can lead such a process of change. We can only hope that a new Chief Justice will lead a process to repair the broken image that our judiciary has acquired over the last few years,” Mahama said.



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