The Chief Justice Georgina Theodora Wood on Friday May 5, 2017 announced that she will retire in the next four weeks with a promise to fight for Prisoners Rights in her new life after 47 years of public service.
Ghana’s first lady chief justice promised to use all legitimate means available to her after retirement to fight for prisoners’ rights in the country.
She said this when she addressed Prison officers, state attorneys, lawyers and judicial service workers after a ‘Justice For All’ sitting at the Nsawam Medium Security Prison.
The Danish Ambassador and the Director of Public Prosecutions were also in the prisons as the CJ witnessed her last Justice For All Programme before she leaves office next month.
In 2015, Joy FM’s Seth Kwame Boateng made a documentary, which tells the stories of shock, pain and sheer neglect of possibly innocent people spending productive hours behind bars.
In response to the documentary, the Chief Justice reactivated the Justice for All Programme which was initiated by the Attorney General and the Ghana Prisons Service (GPS) and aimed at ensuring that hearing is given every citizen, irrespective of one’s social, economic and political background.
The Justice for all programme is a special in-prison court sitting for remand prisoners, prisoners whose trials are unreasonably delayed.
The programme constitutes a key component of the rule of law, access to justice and the sustained promotion and protection of the human rights of prisoners –both remand prisoners and convicted prisoners and of course their handlers, that is officials of the Prisons Service, and by extension the families of these persons that I have identified.
Through the initiative, hundreds of prisoners have been freed from jail and saved the government purse.
Listen to Chief Justice