Justice Dennis Dominic Adjei, a Justice of the Court of Appeal, has urged magistrates and judges against allowing their clerks to extend the remand time for accused people.
He said that in recent years, people on trial had been held for longer than the Constitution's provision of 14 days, infringing on their fundamental human rights.
"Only judges and magistrates have the ability to remand, but allowing our court clerks to prolong dates gives them judicial power, which is why accused individuals are held in jail for more than three years on remand."
"Those accused individuals are not produced after the 14 days have passed, and sometimes when they arrive and the court is not sitting, the clerks assign dates, which is illegal," he stated in Accra during a one-day course for magistrates and justices on the Narcotics Control Commission Act 2020 [Act 1019].
"We should guarantee that when we remand, we keep an eye on the remandees and record them in our notebook," Justice Adjei said, urging magistrates and judges to maintain track of the accused individuals to ensure that their rights were not abused unreasonably. When we sit as judges and magistrates, we must keep in mind that we have a large number of persons on remand who must be brought before us.
He went on to say that the decision will also aid in the decongestion of the county's jails.
Workshop
The workshop was titled "Understanding the Narcotics Control Commission Act 2020 (Act 1019); The Role of Judges in Health and Rights-Based Best Practices to Handling People Who Use Drugs in the Implementation of the Act," and it was co-hosted by the POS Foundation and the Judicial Training Institute.
It was organized in collaboration with the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC) and the West Africa Drug Policy Network's Ghana branch (WADPN).
It was the most recent in a series of stakeholder interactions on the implementation of the new law, which was enacted on March 20, 2020.
The workshop, which was attended by magistrates and judges from Greater Accra, Volta, Eastern, Central, and Western regions, also aimed to educate them on their roles in the delivery of the law while counseling them on best practices in the process.
Jonathan Osei Owusu, the Executive Director of the POS Foundation, revealed that because to the intervention of his organization's Justice For All initiative, an accused individual who had been on detention for more than 20 years was released.
He said that the Criminal and Other Offences (Procedure) Act, 1960 Act 30, had flaws that needed to be addressed.
Judges, for example, may be prepared to commit criminals for a non-custodial term, he noted, but the law restricts them.
Prisons
In comparison to other drug-related criminals, the Director-General of the Ghana Prison Service, Isaac Kofi Egyir, claimed there were not many prisoners in prison detention for "usage of narcotic narcotics."
He did remark, however, that the bulk of them were between the ages of 18 and 35. He stated that the Ghana Prisons Service supports viable alternatives to incarceration for such young individuals.
"Considering the possibility of contamination and other related issues for such folks in congested prison environments," he continued, "the service further urges that this category of users be directed to proper rehabilitation centers for treatment rather than being detained."