Lorraine Bowan

Intro: Locating their study within the 'war on drugs' paradigm, Carrier and Klantschning seek to appraise the moral panic and fear rhetoric that grew out of President Nixon's 1972 concatenation of policing with military intervention. The War on Drugs was the product of the post cold-war reorientation by the Western bureaucracy of threat management, towards countering the drug trade in the scramble to find a new enemy and both deploy, and continue to develop, military technologies of surveillance and attack, and to justify budgeting and staffing into the future.

Taking the right to fair trial as a yardstick for assessing Sierra Leone’s transition from a lawless state at war with itself (1991 – 2002) to the stable democracy of a state with the rule of law, this paper examines three legal cases, each separated by the passage of six years and concerning, firstly, the execution of twelve soldiers accused of treason, secondly, the treason trial of an aspiring politician and thirdly, the detention of ten ex-combatants campaigning for pensions. All were marred by serious procedural unfairness and violations of fair trial rights. The police station, the courthouse and the prison are the places where people face the law but the conceptual spaces of this process are globalised through international law. This paper found that a temporal transition paradigm was less insightful than a paradigm that offers a way of looking into the nature of a sovereignty that resists the actualization of international legal norms in this African setting. The significance of the findings lies in the way we perceive the tension between the citizen and the state in Africa on the one hand and the state as global citizen on the other.

It is the contention of this paper that, rather than being an aberration or anomaly, petty corruption is a socially normal response to a particular constellation of circumstances in the Ghanaian social context; grand corruption, while prevalent, is universally condemned. In the banality of the former lies the genesis of the latter as well as the feint-hearted failure to denounce and prosecute the multitude of corrupt acts that occupy the middle ground. In essence, corruption is, as defined by the World Bank, ‘the abuse of public office for private gain’. Corruption persists in Ghana because it serves the short term and long-term interests of the actors more effectively than licit means. Corruption serves the collective interests of sections of society which repeatedly have recourse to illicit strategies for means achievement or who are habitual beneficiaries of illicit advantages. I address this contention through firstly, defining and delineating the nature of judicial corruption in Ghana and assessing the potential for participatory reform strategies. Secondly, I present a case study of the Republic of Ghana’s prosecution of Tsatsu Tsikata, which will focus on judicial independence and impartiality applying institutional reform models. Thirdly, I evaluate the potential for change and the roles of the actors in strengthening judicial integrity in Ghana.