Most people who need justice in Ghana never get it. Not because they are guilty. Not because the law is against them. But because the system — its language, its distances, its delays — was never designed with them in mind.
This is the problem AWLA Ghana set out to solve in the Northern Region.
Through a project called “Strengthening Civic Participation and Social Accountability in Justice Delivery,” funded by STAR Ghana, our Association established and strengthened Court Users Committees — or CUCs — in the Tamale Metropolis and the Walewale Municipality in the North East Region. The project ran from 2018 to 2020 and produced results that continue to be felt in the communities it touched.
What is a Court Users Committee?
A CUC is not a legal aid clinic. It is not a court. It is something more organic and perhaps more powerful — a community structure that helps ordinary citizens understand, navigate, and participate in the justice delivery system that is supposed to serve them.
AWLA Ghana’s CUCs brought together representatives from criminal justice institutions, community leaders, and trained volunteers who could support court users — people with active cases in the system — to understand their rights, follow their proceedings, and demand accountability when the system moved too slowly or treated them unfairly.
In communities where many citizens could not afford a lawyer, did not know how to file a complaint, or had never been inside a courtroom, the CUC became a bridge between the people and the law.
What participants said
Mr Inusah Iddrisu, Chairman of the CUC in Tamale, described the transformation he witnessed firsthand. Through radio programmes supported by the project, citizens who had never known where to turn began calling him directly for legal guidance.
“After holding about three radio programmes in Tamale and giving my number out to listeners, several citizens who did not know how or where to get justice for various issues now contact me to seek legal advice on their court cases,” he said. “I attend to them and sometimes refer them to seek advice from other legal institutions.”
That sentence carries the full weight of what the project achieved. A man sitting in Tamale, taking calls from citizens who finally knew their rights were worth defending.
Madam Edna Kuma, Executive Director of AWLA Ghana, explained that the CUCs were also deployed to monitor courts directly. Through monitoring desks in courtrooms, the project tracked case progress, documented delays, and reported findings back to stakeholders within the justice system.
The real barriers to justice in northern Ghana
What emerged from the project was a clear picture of what keeps justice out of reach for ordinary people. Participants raised issues that were consistent across communities — courts that were too far away, cases that were adjourned repeatedly with no explanation, bailiff fees charged outside of what was officially required, and a general sense that the system was not watching out for them.
These are not unique problems. But naming them, documenting them, and presenting them to the institutions responsible for fixing them is the first step toward change. AWLA Ghana’s CUCs did exactly that.
A model worth continuing
The “Strengthening Civic Participation” project was implemented across eleven court districts spanning the Ashanti, Greater Accra, Volta, Eastern, Western, Northern, and North East Regions. Each district offered its own version of the same fundamental challenge — communities disconnected from the institutions that were meant to protect them.
At the Tamale stakeholder workshop that concluded the project, AWLA Ghana made a direct appeal to donors and civil society partners to help sustain and expand the CUC model. The infrastructure was in place. The trust had been built. What was needed was continued funding to keep the work alive.
That appeal remains open.
Justice is not a building. It is a process.
The most important thing AWLA Ghana’s Court Users Committees demonstrated is that justice does not begin and end in a courtroom. It begins when a citizen knows that a system exists to protect them. It continues when that citizen has someone who will walk alongside them through the process. And it is delivered — not just in verdicts, but in the everyday experience of being treated with dignity by the institutions that serve them.
That is the standard AWLA Ghana holds. And it is the standard we will continue to fight for.
The “Strengthening Civic Participation and Social Accountability in Justice Delivery” project was funded by STAR Ghana and implemented between 2018 and 2020 across eleven court districts in Ghana.