In one of the most strikingly personal passages of an already blunt open letter to Chief Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie, Team Lead for the People’s Forum, Dennis Miracles Aboagye asks the head of the judiciary a direct question: if government officials become displeased with this letter, will their closeness to the Chief Justice be used to facilitate his persecution, or will the courts protect him as they are constitutionally bound to do?
The question, framed in a dedicated section titled ‘A Personal Note: On the Safety of Dissenting Voices and the Duty of the Courts,’ reflects a broader anxiety that Aboagye says is shared by millions of Ghanaians who are watching the relationship between the judiciary and the executive with growing alarm.
“Should I be worried about persecution, especially if NDC officials become unhappy with this letter? Would their proximity to you grant them unfettered access for a collaboration to persecute me? Or will you hold the sacred oath to protect me with the laws of the Republic?”
The letter does not merely raise the question as a rhetorical device. It situates it in the context of what it describes as a ‘growing and documented pattern of concern about the treatment of dissenting voices, political opponents, and critics under the current administration.’
Most pointedly, the letter directly addresses the judiciary’s own conduct, raising what it calls ‘credible concerns’ that have been ‘publicly raised and not adequately addressed’ about the use of bail conditions to punish political opponents, conditions the letter describes as ‘so punitive, so arbitrary, and so selectively applied that they function not as procedural safeguards, but as instruments of political persecution dressed in the robes of law.’
Legal analysts contacted said the bail conditions allegation, embedded within a letter to the Chief Justice himself and copied to the Ghana Bar Association and Council of State, was ‘unusually direct’ and would likely force a public response from the Judicial Service.
‘What makes this letter constitutionally significant is not just the criticism of the Chief Justice’s social conduct,’ one legal academic said, requesting anonymity. ‘It is the explicit connection drawn between that conduct and the safety of citizens who criticise the government. That is a very serious allegation to put on record in a letter copied to the Council of State.’
Aboagye closes the section by insisting that an independent Chief Justice should require no such assurance to be volunteered, because his conduct would already have made the answer self-evident. ‘The fact that this question is now being asked, by many Ghanaians across political lines, is itself a measure of how far public confidence has eroded,’ the letter states.
The office of the Chief Justice had made no public statement in response to the letter as of the time this article went to press.
Source: tolonradio.com
