High fees deter women from going to court

By Isabella Gyau Orhin

A human rights activist Nana Oye Lithur has said high cost of accessing justice is discouraging a lot of Ghanaian women from taking their cases to court.
. “The court fees are not affordable which makes it harder to gain access to justice,” she said.

Speaking at a one day meeting in Accra on Women and the Justice system in Ghana organized by the Journalists for Human Rights, Nana Oye Lithur said, depending on what needs to be done, court fees can range from 10,000 cedis for a writ of summons at a district court to millions of cedis.
She said after one initiates a court procedure,one needs to pay filing charges, pay bailiffs transport and pay the lawyer.
Sometimes she said one needs to put down between one to two million cedis before a lawyer takes up a case.
That is not all; each time the lawyer goes to court his or her transport must be paid by the complainant.
According to Lithur some lawyers charge between 200 to 300, 000 cedis as transport each time they go to court.


For instance Nana Oye explained that it costs as much as 400,000 cedis to file a divorce case, this is minus lawyers fees of 2, 000, 000, transport cost of 200, 000 cedis per court appearance and bailiffs cost of serving papers which is 100,000 cedis among others.
She said it is because of these problems that the Legal Aid Board and the International Federation of Women lawyers (FIDA) and other independent practitioners are offering services to vulnerable people who cannot afford to seek justice as a result of the high fees.

Added to the issue of cost is the frequent adjournment of cases in the present judicial system in Ghana.

She said since women are engaged in economic activities or are in employment, it is difficult for them to leave their work and attend the court hearings.

“How do they leave their work, and spend half their time in court?” she asked.
She said a study done by a Canadian organisation known as CUSO is a pointer to this fact.
For the cases they studied, there were 70 percent adjournments.
For 34 percent of the cases, the adjournments were at the instance of the prosecution.
In Tamale, it climbed to 54 percent with 30 percent attributable to the court.

Nana Oye Lithur also said sometimes it is difficult for women to enforce judgments they obtain in court especially in property settlement cases with their spouses and also maintenance of their children.
“This is because the men work in the informal sector and the women do not know their income to facilitate attachment by the court,” she said.
Nana Oye Lithur who is also the head of the African Office of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) said most of the cases women take to court bother on domestic violence with rape and threats topping the list.
“For children of whom girls are the most, the highest type of cases is defilement cases,” she said.
For instance from 2002 to 2006, 4468 cases of defilement were reported to the police. Also for the first quarter of 2006, also the total number of victims that reported cases to the Domestic Violence Victims Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service was 239 females as against 45 males.
Lithur said most of he victims were aged between 13 and 18 years.

Again statistics from the Judicial Service shows that of the 2145 cases studied in the courts, 44 percent of these cases involved assault and 90 percent of offenders were males.
Other women also take cases concerning maintenance of children and custody related cases to court.

“Other cases women take to court include divorce, matrimonial cases and inheritance related cases,” she said adding “For divorce, it is likely the petitioner will be a woman.”
Nana Oye Lithur further said, another barrier women face as they seek justice in the law court is that of language and the adversarial system being practiced in the court system instead of conciliatory or mediatory system.
She said women are by nature are not adversarial or competitive and as such this practices at the court makes them uncomfortable.

Speaking at the meeting, a Human Rights Expert with the Journalists for Human Rights, a Canadian based Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) Nick Fobih asked journalists to verify human rights cases and give fair hearing to all sides of a case before publication.