When the Supreme Court convenes its special session on 28 February, 2014 at Greenhill in Accra, the court will be packed with judges, lawyers, students and other venerable members of the legal community who would have descended on GIMPA to be part of that special session of the Chief Justice’s Court.

The Court itself, though presided over by the Chief Justice, will not be the Supreme Court of Ghana you are too familiar with—the one some have christened Atuguba’s court, following the recent Presidential Election Petition over which Justice Atuguba presided.

At the bar, t will not be the barristers and solicitors of the Supreme Court whose names are on your lips—Tony Lithur, Philip Addison, Tsatsu Tsikata or even the all famous amicus curiae, Amekoudzi. When the bailiff calls the matter of “Family and Youth Development Agency v. Attorney-General”, the only case on the docket of the court for that day, it will be students who will announce themselves as counsel —law students who are still learning the art of advocacy and the vocation of legal practice in the Chief Justice’s court.  The Court will be a moot panel convened within the context of the GEORGINA T. WOOD MOOT COURT COMPETITION to hear the earlier mentioned case following the invocation of its jurisdiction by the Family and Youth Development Agency (FAYDA), the imaginary human rights NGO that has sued the Attorney-General.

The Georgina T. Wood Moot Court Competition is an initiative of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology Faculty of Law intended to bring the country’s Law Faculties together for competitive mooting at the national level.  The competition which is the first of its kind in Ghana, and for which Her Ladyship the Chief Justice has given her gracious blessing, was launched on 20 March, 2013 at the KNUST Law Students’ Week Celebration which she attended.

A moot court is an imaginary case in which law students, acting as lawyers, argue before a panel of judges who may in fact be real judges or just lawyers. The outcome of the case is not based its underlying merits or which party would win if the facts were a real life situation. The purpose of a moot court, therefore, is to access the confidence of the student counsel, their knowledge of the law and their art of legal advocacy –the lawyer’s term for courtroom language skills and etiquette.

While they serve as training grounds for would be lawyers, moot courts do not necessarily end once a person becomes a lawyer. In some jurisdictions like the United States, moot courts are usually employed as practice for lawyers when they have to argue a ground breaking case. Here, the cases are not imaginary or hypothetical. They are real life cases that are argued in a moot court scenario. This is done with the view to helping the lawyer shape up his arguments, anticipate the likely questions that may come from the bench and, thus, put him in readiness to deal with them. Apart from these however, a moot court remains largely as an academic exercise for law students. It could be a mode of assessment by which students are graded in a particular subject or just a mere “legal game” for intra and inter-school “tournaments”. A moot court competition could thus, in simple and crude terms, be said to be a tournament in which teams made up of law students participate by arguing a hypothetical or imaginary case before a panel of judges.

Moot court competitions are not a rare phenomenon. Indeed, there are several of them. A moot court competition may be classified based on one of two factors, or both. One may identify them based on the subject area of the law on which they focus, as in the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition which, for instance, focuses on the international law of the outer space or the International Criminal Court Moot Court Competition, whose focus is international criminal law. Where they are classified based on geography, they could be national, regional or international competitions.

A moot court competition is national if participation in it is limited to only law schools or faculties within a particular country. Participation in a regional moot court competition is usually open to all schools in a geo-political region of the world. Examples are the African Human Rights Moot Court Competition and the Inter-American Human Rights Moot Court Competition. With international or global moot courts, the most important of them being the Phillip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition, participation is open to all law schools or faculties in the world. For such global competitions like the Jessup though, elimination rounds may be held at various national or regional levels from which the qualifying schools then face off in the international rounds.

If moot court competitions are not uncommon, then the question is: what took us so long in Ghana to have an indigenous national moot court competition? For an answer to this question, it is perhaps important to take a cursory look at the evolution of legal education in this country. Legal education in Ghana is a two-stage process. To qualify as a lawyer one must obtain a law degree from an institution recognized by the General Legal Council, the regulatory body in charge of the profession in Ghana. Then one must enroll in, and pass all the examinations required for the professional legal programme at the Ghana School of Law. That body is, at present, the only institution vested with the authority to train law graduates to become professional lawyers.

Until 2003, when the Faculty of Law at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology was established, there was only one law degree awarding institution in Ghana, and that was the University of Ghana Faculty of Law.  All law graduates from the University of Ghana effectively had an automatic right of entry into the Ghana School of Law where they underwent training to become practicing lawyers. Due to this sort of duopoly in the legal educational landscape shared by two institutions (which were somehow two sides of the same coin), there was hardly any incentive or reason to have inter-school competitions like moot courts, mock trials or debates. Such competitions if they existed were mainly internal contests held within either of the institutions as part of activities marking their annual law week celebrations. There has therefore not been any home-grown and nationally organized moot court competition in the history of Ghana’s legal education.

The University of Ghana Faculty of Law and the Ghana School of Law, had however been known to register and participate in some international moot court competitions. The University of Ghana, for instance, has had a long history of participating in the African Human Rights Moot Court, and actually hosted the competition in the year 2000. The Ghana School of Law also until the year 2011 had always participated in the Philip C. Jessup Moot International Law Moot Court Competition as Ghana’s sole representative.

The establishment of the KNUST Faculty of Law, marked the start of inter-school moot court competitions, albeit, at the informal level. These were usually friendly contests held between the KNUST and the University of Ghana Faculties of Law as part of either’s Law Week celebration. In the year 2007 however, the first ever competitive moot court contest was held between the KNUST Faculty of Law and the Ghana School of Law. This was the national round of the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition held between the two institutions to determine which of them should represent the country at the international rounds of the competition in Washington DC.

For the next two years, the University of Ghana Faculty of Law joined the KNUST Faculty of Law in competing with the Ghana School of Law for the sole slot to the Jessup Competition. In 2010 the KNUST Faculty of Law which had been instrumental in pioneering this national round of the Jessup withdrew further participation. 

As a result, only the University of Ghana and the Ghana School of Law contested in the 2010 National Round of the Jessup Moot Court Competition, with the Ghana School of Law, as usual, emerging as the sole representative of Ghana to the international rounds. With the KNUST Faculty of Law ending their participation in the Competition, things were set to fall apart. Indeed the Ghana School of Law has also since 2010 ended their participation in the Jessup Competition, bringing to a total close any inter-school moot court competition at the national level.

While participation in regional and international court competitions is a good thing which should be encouraged, the deeper insight a national moot court is adapted to provide into the workings of a country’s legal system for the benefit of participants cannot be underestimated. There is also the issue of national pride—a vibrant national moot court competition is undoubtedly a testament to the maturity, if not the quality, of the legal education in a state. With the multiplicity of law faculties in the country, the environment is right for such home-grown national moot court. The Georgina T. Wood Moot Court Competition could therefore not have come at a better time.

The area of law on which the Competition is based is constitutional and human rights law. The objective is to build the capacities of participating students to appreciate and advocate issues of constitutional and human rights law, direct their interest to public interest law practice, and generally create a platform for law students to develop their writing and advocacy skills. The facts of Hypothetical Case for this maiden edition of the Competition do just that. They challenge the minds of students come up with ingenious arguments to answer critical questions that hang over some untested provisions of the 1992 Constitution.

FAYDA, the imaginary plaintiff in the case, is an NGO that describes itself as “an organisation dedicated to human rights and the protection of civil liberties through advocacy and public interest litigation”. Its core business has been research and advocacy on the rights and living conditions of children. In 2012 it won the Global Prize for Children’s Rights Advocacy. This was a UNICEF award given in recognition of the Agency’s research findings that unearthed the damaging impacts corporal punishment has had on children’s right to education. Though FAYDA prompted Government to take steps to abolish corporal punishment based on its findings, nothing was done.

Following that, there have been other incidents involving children which FAYDA has closely monitored and investigated. The first to engage its attention and involvement was the practice in some senior high schools where authorities intercept letters and parcels addressed to students, and seize those they determine to “contain inappropriate messages” or items. The second was a peculiar incident at the Great Miracle College.  Here FAYDA discovered, that on a suspicion of having tattoos, the headmaster had ordered all students of the College to be strip searched. Those students found with tattoos had been sent home to return only after they have gotten rid of them. 

FAYDA considers these incidents as well the unresolved corporal punishment issue as abusive of the human rights of students in basic and senior high schools generally. Upon unsuccessful attempts to get audience with the educational authorities, it has sued the Government through the Attorney-General in the Supreme Court. The Attorney-General disputes not only the merits of the case, but also the jurisdiction of the court.  Consequently, in addition to the question of jurisdiction, the parties have agreed and submitted the following issues to the court for determination: (a) whether corporal punishment in schools is a degrading and dehumanizing punishment prohibited by the Constitution; (b) whether the practice of school authorities in intercepting letters and parcels addressed to students is a violation of their constitutional right to privacy; and (c) whether the measures by Great Miracle College in respect of students with tattoos  was unreasonably intrusive of their persons and a violation of the freedom of expression protected by  the Constitution.

As the Competition kicks off on 28 February, three out of the nation’s five law faculties, namely, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science & Technology Faculty of Law; the University of Ghana Faculty of Law and GIMPA Law School, will be battling for the ultimate.  The University of Cape Coast Faculty of Law and the Mountcrest University College Faculty of Laws, who are unable to participate in the maiden edition, will be attending as observers. It will be a gathering of the finest of Ghana’s legal community to celebrate ten years of the KNUST Faculty of Law and its modest achievements, one of which is the moot court competition.

It will also be an occasion to pay tribute to the great minds and efforts that gave birth to this unprecedented initiative in the history of legal education in Ghana. The journey to the Georgina T. Wood Moot Court Competition has been a long and tortuous one. And as I said at the launch of the competition about a year ago, “this idea of a national moot court competition was born out of moot court frustrations.” In February 2009 my friend, Nelson Akondo, and I had had the opportunity to participate in the National Rounds of the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition. We lost out and could not qualify for the final and so we did not win the ticket to represent Ghana at the International Rounds in Washington DC as we had hoped for. Like almost every loser does, we believed we had been robbed. Then in August 2009 we found ourselves again this time in Lagos, Nigeria,(of all of places) to participate in the 18th African Human Rights Moot Court Competition. We again could not qualify for the finals. And being where we were, we were tempted to think that this time there had been a 419, only we did not end up thinking so because, fortunately or unfortunately, all the participating schools from Nigeria including the host school were also eliminated in the prelims.

That is not to say we were in anyway consoled; we were disappointed and distraught by our own personal failures. I remember telling Nelson that I was “hanging my jacket” meaning—I was retiring from anything that had to do with moot courts. But as fate would have it, it was in the course of this discussion of our personal disappointments that the idea of a national moot court came up. Since we had failed to win the ultimate in all those competitions, we thought that our triumph in moot courts, perhaps, did not lie in participating in competitions organized by others, but in creating one for others to compete in. It is against this backdrop we finally, in 2011, put our ideas on paper into what we called the Moot Court Concept and the Moot Court Charter—the two documents that respectively give flesh to the rough idea we had and create a set of guidelines by which the Competition is to be organized.

But, to use an agricultural metaphor, it has to be said that having the seeds of the idea alone would have been insufficient to bring to reality Ghana’s first moot court competition.  However the maiden edition turns out, it will be to the equal, if not the greater, credit of Prof. Stephen Offei, Dean of the KNUST Faculty of Law, and Ms. Fafanyo Kukubor, the immediate past president of the  KNUST Law Students Union, who provided the fertile ground on which this promising competition now stands sprouting like a plantlet. They saw the vision in the idea and offered it their support; that is why, and how, the maiden edition of the Georgina T. Wood Moot Court Competition will be a reality on 28 February, 2014. 

Together with all the others, including the Honorable Lady Chief Justice, who have or would have, played various roles in making the maiden edition possible, we will have kept our charge by giving Ghana its first ever national moot court —the Georgina T. Wood Moot Court Competition. And almost feeling like patriots, we will retire to our beds with pride in our hearts, knowing that we have served the cause of legal education in Ghana and that those on whom the mantle shall fall will not leave the plantlet, orphaned and wilted, under the fury of a scorching sun.