Tamale, Nov 24, GNA – A town hall meeting has been held in Tamale to increase citizens oversight, involve stakeholders and advocate for the use of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms in resolving cases and the utilisation of the electronic Integrated Criminal Justice Case-Tracking System (CTS).
The day’s meeting, held on Wednesday, was also to create awareness of, and rally support for the need to pass into law, the Community Service Bill 2018, which would provide for, or use other non-traditional sentencing approaches in convicting offenders for certain types of offences considered minor or misdemeanors instead of the usual custodial sentencing.
Participants included leaders of market associations from the Central Market, tailors association, teachers, and representatives of Justice Sector Institutions.
It was organised by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), a non-governmental organisation, as part of its Justice Sector Support Activity (JSS), which is being implemented in forty (40) targeted districts in seven regions with funding support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The activity aims at ensuring that marginalised communities through mobilisation and innovative public education programme were aware of and supported to track progress of the delivery of the CTS.
In 2018, Ghana launched the CTS project to support key stakeholders in the justice delivery system to collect, collate and harmonise statistical data for effective justice delivery.
The CTS project, which is being supported by the USAID, is to enable key actors in justice delivery system to electronically access and track the various stages of criminal cases from the point of arrest, investigations, prosecution, conviction, rehabilitation and release.
Mr Samuel Fant Kombian, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Specialist at LRC, who took participants through the background of Ghana’s CTS and its importance to justice delivery, said the CTS was the surest bet to expediting justice delivery in the country.
Mr Kombian said “We are expecting that we build people’s knowledge on the various forms of access to justice that will help them to be able to access justice anytime their rights are being violated.”
He urged participants to be ambassadors of the CTS by educating their members about the platform, and the benefits the country stood to gain from it such that it would be sustained.
He spoke about the Community Service Bill, which talked about community sentencing to help reduce the overcrowding at the prisons by getting people, who committed minor offences, to be given some form of communal labour.
Source: Ghana News Agency
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