Kumasi, July 25, GNA – Justice Kwasi Annin-Yeboah, the Chief Justice, has launched the Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) Week for this Legal Year Term in Kumasi, with a call on all stakeholders to support the system to enhance access to justice.
The Week, which is being marked on the theme, “Alternative Dispute Resolution: A tool for Peace and Stability,” seeks to improve access to justice and protect the rights of the vulnerable in society.
The focus of the Week is to reduce the backlog of cases at the 131 participating courts across the country by devoting the entire week for settlement of cases with ADR.
There shall also be awareness creation about the existence of the ADR among the general public and the need for disputants to take advantage of the mechanism to seek redress.
Mr Anin-Yeboah said in 2001 various courts in Ghana were overwhelmed with backlog of cases which slowed the adjudication processes due to the demand for justice by the citizenry.
“In order to reverse this trend and ensure that the courts remained efficient, ADR was adopted to complement the courts for accelerated access to justice,” he said.
He said since its inception over the last one and half decade, caseload in the traditional courts had been reduced by 29,558 cases.
“The good news is that this number of cases resolved at ADR are resolved absolutely without parties coming back to the courts for appeals,” the Chief Justice said.
He said the importance of ADR gave management of the Judicial Service compelling grounds to focus attention on ADR and resource the directorate to do more to make the courts efficient, user friendly and to make access to justice unimpeded.
He urged the Bar as a major stakeholder to cooperate with the Judiciary to entrench ADR in the adjudication system at all levels.
“I therefore urge lawyers who lack capacity in ADR to, as a matter of urgency, take steps to enhance their capacities so as to enable them contribute to the success of the Court Connected ADR programme,” he said.
He also urged Court Registrars and staff to handle ADR processes with all seriousness as they did with the regular court processes.
Justice Irene-Charity Larbi, a Justice of the Court of Appeal and Judge-in-Charge of ADR, said the regular courts system despite having its own strengths, was characterised by factors that occasioned delays and costs, thereby making access to justice, most of the time very difficult.
She said one of the benefits of ADR over the conventional litigation was privacy, saying that some people preferred ADR rather than embarrass themselves in open court.
“This is because when the matter is heard in the open, the media may pick it up and place it in the public domain, thereby making the parties involved susceptible to all types of comments and sometimes public ridicule,” she said.
GNA