Mr Ambrose Dery, Minister for the interior has said that Ghana had 18,027 convicts under the West African Police Information System (WAPIS).
He said out of the total, 4,800 were foreigners.
This was during the opening ceremony of a three-day awareness creation of WAPIS to encourage law enforcement agencies on the role and its use in the enhancement of of the security system in Ghana.
WAPIS is an initiative of West African Countries under ECOWAS aimed at building an effective national, regional and international response to national, regional and international criminal threats effectively including transnational organised crime and terrorism.
Its objectives is to enhance capacity of law enforcement agencies of West African Countries to fight these criminal threats, improve capacities of stakeholders to collect, process, analyse and share information among national security bodies and with other countries within the Region.