As of Friday, April 26, 2024, the population of the Kumasi Central Prison is around 1800, significantly more than the 600 places available for detainees.
This state of affairs is comparable to those of other jails around the nation. Concerns of over overcrowding, which violates the rights of both detained and remanded convicts, have been voiced by judges, attorneys, prison officials, and other parties.
In the meanwhile, Ghana made a huge advancement in 2008 when it established mobile in-prison courts that provide free legal services to remand offenders and introduced the Justice for All Program to decide matters involving them.
Although the number of remand prisoners has decreased, this measure is still insufficient to guarantee proper administration of justice.
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights judge, Justice Sir Dennis Dominic Adjei, a judge of appeals, emphasized the scarcity of attorneys and their incapacity to handle the increasing number of detainees.
He underlined how important paralegal services are to helping attorneys deliver justice.
“It is a must that any person who is charged by a court must be represented by a lawyer, the African court has given several decisions against some countries such as Benin, Cote D’Ivoire, and Rwanda, the argument they put up is that we don’t have enough lawyers to meet the demands of accused persons. We must establish paralegal services in the country to support them. Some people languish in jail because they don’t have lawyers.”
These statements were delivered at a training on access to legal assistance and commissioning a paralegal office for justice sector players held in Kumasi by the POS Foundation with financing from GIZ.
One of Ghana’s most prominent human rights civil societies is the POS Foundation. It has collaborated with the Ghana Prisons Service throughout the years, and in 2018 the in-person paralegal program was successfully piloted at Nsawam Medium Security Prison.
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