Lawyer and Vice-President of policy think tank, IMANI-Ghana, Kofi Bentil is blaming the delays in paying judicial staff workers as the cause of the current scandal that has hit the service.<\/p>\n
He maintains that if such issues are not addressed corruption will still prevail in the system.<\/p>\n
The judicial service has experienced a massive shake up after 34 judges and several other judicial service workers were caught on camera allegedly taking bribes<\/a><\/strong><\/span> with the intention to influence judgments.<\/p>\n [contextly_sidebar id=”kJitUvGWVuTaI2CNPzYPjUbWc9rTIg9K”]So far 22 of the judges have been suspended<\/a><\/strong><\/span> while investigations have begun to fish out the judicial staff that facilitated the bribes.<\/p>\n Speaking to Citi News\u2019<\/strong> Fred Djabanor at the Bar Conference in Kumasi, Kofi Bentil indicated that some of his friends who are judges have been complaining about delayed payments, sometimes for 8 months or more.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we are dealing with now is symptomatic; it is the system of a deeper systemic problem and my personal view is that the problem is with the judicial service. I have friends who are judges and for eight months, they haven\u2019t been paid after being posted. How is that explainable? We have situations where our judge friends tell us that by becoming a judge your life is restricted. But clearly, the way you are managed and handled by the judicial system leaves you more or less to the vagaries of the profession, the negatives of it.\u201d<\/p>\n He said if the nation is able to put “better structures and deal with the systemic issues, it will reduce the need and the pressure which make judges vulnerable to these things.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawyer explained that “…If we have a quicker, effective and efficient systems” it will remove what he termed bottlenecking.<\/p>\n “Bottlenecking is where people create constrictions within the system which require you to open up and you open them up by greasing those people. Those constrictions if the system are good will not be there because somebody will make sure that some judicial officer does not create that constriction. Why do dockets get missing, why do we have all these problems lawyers would have to go through for which reason they through caution to the wind saying even if I dealt with this in another way all these things will not matter.”<\/p>\n Increased court fees<\/strong><\/p>\n He said though the issue must be addressed “topically we should also look at the systemic issues that create the symptoms” adding that “the systemic issues mostly reside within the judicial system.”<\/p>\n The Judicial Service in February 2015 increased the court fees<\/a><\/strong><\/span> by between 50 and 300 hundred percent.<\/p>\n Kofi Bentil suggested that the revenue accruing from such fees could be used to provide better incentives for the judges and the judicial officers to deter them from selling justice.<\/p>\n \u201c…With that income coming in, I really don\u2019t know why we cannot modernize our judiciary and do the simple things that will remove some of these problems. If we did I think that will be the start of removing corruption generally, at least reducing it. I think people don\u2019t go to the bar or become lawyers or go to the bench to become judges so they will collect bribes. Nobody will risk their life.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the investigative journalist who captured on video the judges taking the bribes, Anas Aremeyaw Anas had said, it took him two years to complete the investigations.<\/p>\n JUSSAG strike<\/strong><\/p>\n In a related development, the Judicial Service Staff Association of Ghana (JUSSAG) in May declared an indefinite strike<\/a><\/strong> <\/span>over their unpaid allowances.<\/p>\n They threatened not to return to work unless their grievances were resolved.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n By: Godwin A. Allotey\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana
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