Judicial Secretary, Musah Ahmed, says the judiciary has put in place a comprehensive system designed to tackle the long-standing problem of case delays — one that combines the newly established Specialised High Court Division with afternoon courts to significantly reduce the workload on individual judges.
Ahmed made the remarks on The Law on Joy News, providing the most detailed explanation yet of how the reforms introduced by Chief Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie will work in practice.
“The system we are creating has taken care of all those delays,” Ahmed said. “We have put in place now a new system which seeks to transform the system where one particular judge is given different subject matters to try, for which reason he’s touching on various subjects before him, which could lead to inefficiency and delays.”
At the heart of the new approach is a simple but significant shift: reducing the number of cases before any single judge. Ahmed explained that afternoon courts will play a key role in this, with cases redistributed from morning sessions to afternoon court judges to ease the burden on their counterparts handling the morning docket — including those sitting in the specialised courts.
“What we are doing now is to reduce the number of cases before a particular judge. This then calls for the establishment of the afternoon courts so that we will push a number of those cases to the afternoon court judges to try them,” he said.
The old model, Ahmed argued, was a recipe for slowness. A judge juggling different subject matters across unrelated cases — from land disputes to financial crimes to cybersecurity — could not reasonably be expected to deliver swift, focused decisions. The new model flips that logic entirely.
Under the reformed system, judges in the Specialised High Court Division are assigned cases within a defined subject area.
“These are assigned specific cases; they effectively deal with them as a subject, and then they dispose of them with dispatch,” Ahmed explained.
The Specialised High Court Division, formally established through a Chief Justice circular on February 5, 2026, covers corruption and public accountability, natural resources and galamsey, state asset recovery, and organised crime and security.
Complementing this, the Chief Justice ordered that High Court offices remain open from 8:00 am to 6:30 pm on weekdays — creating the operational window needed to run both morning and afternoon court sessions effectively.
The reforms come amid years of public frustration over how long it takes Ghanaian courts to resolve high-profile cases, particularly those involving corruption and galamsey. Cases that have dragged on for years with little movement have eroded public trust in the justice system, making the pressure on the judiciary to act both immense and urgent.
The Judicial Service is also revising the Rules of Court, expected to come into force by March 2026, alongside technological innovations to further enhance the delivery of justice.
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Source: www.myjoyonline.com
