Ho, April 30, GNA – Citizen Monitoring Groups in the Volta Region have been strengthened to make use of the Case Tracking System (CTS) in ensuring criminal justice delivery.
Legal Resource Centre (LRC), a nonprofit, partnered with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and Crime Check Foundation to provide a trainer of trainers’ workshop for monitoring groups from the six districts in the Region.
The implementing districts of the CTS are Ho, Hohoe, Agotime-Ziope, Ketu North and South and South Dayi.
The LRC also partnered with the Global Action for Women Empowerment (GLOWA), also a nonprofit, which helped provide access to the citizen monitoring groups.
The government in 2018 with funding support from the USAID Justice Sector Support (JSS) Activity to track criminal cases among the six-justice institutions- the Police, the Judicial Service, the Prison Service, the Economic and Organised Crime Office, the Legal Aid Commission, and the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General’s Office launched the CTS.
It is being piloted in 40 districts within seven Regions.
Ms Daphne Lariba Nabila, Executive Director of the LRC and Chief of Party for the USAID JSS Activity, who opened the training workshop in Ho, said they were pushing justice institutions to use the CTS to enhance justice in Ghana.
Mr Enock Jengre, Rule of Law Specialist with the LRC, who led the training in Ho said to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that the aim was to reduce the backlog in cases and help address challenges in judicial adjudication.
He said the formal system of the court structure was affecting justice delivery, adding that it was increasingly becoming expensive to use a lawyer to defend justice, contributing to overcrowding in the nation’s prisons.
Mr Jengre said there was the need to ensure the CTS was properly utilised and that the LRC was supporting stakeholders in that regard.
He said the training would equip the citizen monitoring groups to visit Police stations, Courts and the other institutions to make sure the system was working.
The facilitator said the training would enable them to work effectively with the various sector institutions to ensure the nation had a “good system in place.”
The LRC would facilitate the work of the monitoring groups by helping build working relationships with the various institutions.
He said a robust public education would be rolled out on the case tracking system, and urged the public to maintain faith in the justice delivery system.
Participants were introduced to the nation’s justice system and the six justice institutions and were also taught to effectively use the CTS.
“My interest is to get to know the law and to help the vulnerable become aware of the law and safeguard their fundamental human rights”, Gloria Dushie, a participant from the Ketu North Municipality noted told the GNA.
The CTS is available in online, offline, and android versions, with a total of 757 sites, which includes 508 Police sites, and 200 for the Judiciary.
The Prison Service has 27 sites, Legal Aid has seven while the EOCO and the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General Department has eight and seven sites respectively.