An assessment of the accessibility and utilisation of legal aid services in Ghana

Inhaltsangabe oder Einleitung

The provision of legal aid services for the poor, marginalized and excluded groups of persons has increasingly attracted the attention of the global development community due to its role in improving access to justice and in providing beneficiaries with access to legal entitlements, resolution of disputes, and justice processes. It has also been globally accepted under the Sustainable Development Goals (i.e. Goal 16) that rule of law and equal access to justice for all should be promoted at both national and international levels and that adequate investments in legal aid provision should also be made.

Legal aid provision has emerged as a crucial tool aimed at strengthening democratic governance, fostering peace and achieving progress towards sustainable development. It has been regarded as an important tool in tackling issues of women’s inheritance rights, empowering local communities to promote the accountability of extractive industries, securing legal identity or ensuring equal access to health, education and other social and economic services (UNDP, 2016).

In the African region, access to justice by impoverished and marginalized people has been a constraint. Women living in rural areas are denied their rights to inherit the property of their deceased spouse, subsistence labourers are denied their wage by persons who engaged their services, and some persons at times are held in police custody without due process of law. In view of these, many African countries have guaranteed the right to a fair trial and equal access to legal service in their Constitutions. The right to legal aid in Africa has been affirmed in various regional human rights documents such as the 1999 Dakar Declaration and Recommendations, the Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Fair Trial and Legal Assistance in Africa (2001), the 2003 Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa and the 2004 Lilongwe Declaration on Accessing Legal Aid in the Criminal Justice System in Africa (UNDP, 2016b; Atuguba et al., 2006).