Re: Judicial Service justifies employee's dismissal

The Office of the Chief Justice has dismissed as false, malicious and defamatory, a news item carried by GhanaWeb and Peacefmonline on Wednesday, September 24, 2014, under the headline, "The Chief Justice victimised me - Dismissed employee", which sought to question the fairness in the dismissal of an employee of the Judicial Service.

The story in question which was falsely attributed to the Ghana News Agency (GNA), sought to imply that the Chief Justice, Mrs. Georgina Theodora Wood, and the Director of Communications, Mrs. Grace Tagoe, had side-stepped all the internal disciplinary procedures to arbitrarily relieve Miss Mamley Kisseih, a High Court Registrar/Protocol Officer in the Communications Department of the Service, of her post.

However, a letter signed by the Judicial Secretary, Mr. Justice Alex B. Opoku-Acheampong, and issued to the Ghana News Agency on Thursday, said the content of the publication was “totally at variance with the proceedings of the Appointments and Disciplinary Committee, the outcome of which led to the permanent disengagement” of Ms. Kisseih from the Judicial Service.

Also, a report submitted by Management to the Appointments and Disciplinary Committee of the Judicial Council, dated September 3, 2014, outlined several reasons for the dismissal of Ms. Mamley Kisseih who was employed in June 2010.

They included persistent absenteeism from work without permission and refusal to carry out instructions.

According to the Disciplinary Committee report, in October 2013, she absented herself from work for more than 10 days and in those instances all she did was send text messages to her head of department with different excuses, one of them being having to send her son to hospital.

“That on 27th December 2013, when your Head of Department drew your attention to the fact that your period of lactation as a nursing mother had elapsed, your response was that you could not remember the date of birth of your child you had given birth to barely a year ago, and that it was possible for a mother to forget the date of birth of her child.

“That a search conducted at the University of Ghana revealed that you were pursuing a regular Master of Arts programme at the University ...” the report stated among others.

“So you see, contrary to the wrong impression the news item sought to create, we exhausted all the laid down disciplinary procedures, including the involvement of the Appointments and Disciplinary Committee of the Judicial Council in the matter, before the decision to remove her from office was arrived at”, explained the Chief Justice during a call on her on Thursday afternoon by a GNA delegation led by the General Manager, Dr. Bernard Otabil.

The purpose of the visit by Dr. Otabil and his team was to assure the Chief Justice and the Judiciary that the Agency had no hand in the publication in question and that it was up to GhanaWeb and Peacefmonline to show how they came by the story.

To this end, the GNA issued a disclaimer disassociating itself from the story as soon as it appeared on Wednesday, the General Manager further indicated.

Meanwhile, preliminary investigation carried out by the Agency into the circumstances surrounding the publication has revealed that a member of staff in its Tema Office who happens to be the husband of Ms. Mamley Kisseih, wrote the story.

Realising that his organisation would most certainly reject the story on grounds of editorial policy, the employee in question diverted it to other media networks including Ghanaweb and Peacefmonline, but misleadingly maintained the three-letter endline “GNA” to give it credibility.