'Cap number of SC judges to save treasury'

A ceiling must be put on the number of justices that a president can appoint to serve on the bench to reduce pressure on the state treasury, private legal practitioner Chris Ackumey has suggested.

"Definitely I believe that there should be some form of limitation," Mr Ackumey told Godwin Agyei-Gyemfi, host of Class 91.3fm’s 'Point of Law' programme on Tuesday.

Ghana’s 1992 constitution has not expressly stated the limit on the number of justices that a president can appoint on to the bench.

Article 128 (1) states that: 'The Supreme Court shall consist of the Chief Justice and not less than nine other Justices of the Supreme Court.'

Explaining his reasons for his suggestion, Mr Ackumey said putting a cap on appointments to the bench will reduce pressure on taxpayers since judges retire on their salaries.

"If you even look at the emoluments of the Supreme Court judges, you know they retire on their salaries, so, therefore, if you have 12 or 15 – and to consider the fact that they rise through the ranks – by the time they get there they might be 60 or 65 [years], and staying there for some 10 years and getting off and retiring on their salary, that might even put a burden on the consolidated fund," Mr Ackumey said.

"Apart from that, they are entitled to accommodation or a bungalow, police protection, a vehicle and everything, so that to open up the public purse or the treasury or the Consolidated Fund to an unlimited expenditure, I think is not something that is in the interest of the taxpayer," he added.

In May 2010, the Daily Graphic reported that retired Supreme Court judge, Mr Justice Kafui Paku Kludze, argued against putting a cap on the number of Supreme Court judges when he spoke at a roundtable organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), on the topic: “The absence of a ceiling on the number of Supreme Court Judges appointed.”

Justice Kludze said rather than capping appointments on the bench, the institutions mandated to advise the President on the appointment of judges should be strengthened to perform their roles well to prevent unqualified and incompetent people from sitting on the Supreme Court bench.

"Without constraining ourselves into a constitutional straightjacket, the institutions and bodies currently in place, if properly performing their assigned constitutional roles, are adequate to scrutinise the qualifications of nominees, and also to control the numbers on the Supreme Court bench," he said.

"An attempt to fix a maximum number would not be the result of any acceptable scientific research but an arbitrary estimate," he argued.

There are fears presidents could exploit the vacuum to pack the bench with cronies to swing judgments their way.

Mr Kludze, however, said at that forum that: "Most judges anywhere show judicial independence, based on their judicial oath and fidelity to the established principles and doctrines of the law. A Supreme Court Judge would also be concerned about how history would assess his tenure on the bench, where every word falling from his mouth would be in printed reports for posterity," he said.

"The suggestion that judges, because of who appointed them, would ignore the tenets, dictates and established principles of the law and play politics with legal issues is nurtured primarily by persons, whether lawyers or not, who think that the law has no meaning," he added.