Code of conduct for prosecutors

The Attorney-General’s Department is drafting a code of conduct for prosecutors to ensure greater transparency, accountability and efficiency in their work.

The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mrs Betty Mould-Iddrisu, made this known at a symposium organised by Lawyers in Search of Democracy (LINSOD), a non-governmental organisation (NGO).

Speaking on the theme, “The Law as a Tool for Consolidating Democracy in Ghana”, Mrs Mould-Iddrisu said, “No democratic system can be sustained for long without a common recognition of the fact that the system of justice and the application of laws are blind to fame and rank that all are equal before the law.”

She said while Ghanaians had generally shown a fair understanding of the democratic system in Ghana, the law continued to be seen by majority of the populace as an inaccessible, strange system of complicated rules and mystical principles.

She described as sad the perception that the administration of law and justice in the country was riddled with corruption and detached from the daily lives of the people.

Mrs Mould-Iddrisu noted that the 1992 Constitution provided a catalogue of agreed-on virtues that set out the political, social, cultural and economic ideals that the country should aspire to and manifest in our growing democracy.

She stated that the inability to achieve moral or legal consensus on all matters of law and legal policy was no license for a perverse approach to law, which denied the law its spirit or turned legal rules into convenient instruments for prosecuting agendas that denigrated the values of the country’s democracy.

“The Judiciary ensures our forward march in constitutional rule to avert any serious risk of constitutional derailment. In discharging its foremost duty and mandate to defend and uphold the Constitution, it ensures that the rule of law prevails,” she said.

That, she added, should be manifested at all levels – when the Judiciary protected individuals from the impermissible exercise of state power, from the wrongdoing of others, from the strong, the powerless from the powerful, as well as assert the legitimate interests of the state in deserving cases.

She observed that the Directive Principles of State Policy in Chapter 6 of the 1992 Constitution held the elixir of the country’s constitutional values, adding that “every institution of state in its choices and operations needs to measure itself against the values in the Directive Principles of State Policy. Indeed, the ideal is that all rules of law must be applied and interpreted in ways that accord with the realisation of the political, social, cultural and economic visions encapsulated in the Directive Principles of State Policy”.

She noted that in the quest to push the development agenda forward, there was the need to strike a balance between protecting the interests of all Ghanaians in our natural wealth and endowments, while maintaining an attractive investment destination.

Source: Daily Graphic