Ghana’s Constitutional Transition Deficit in Criminal Justice: Reconstructing the Criminal Law and Procedure of the Fourth Republic

This article gives that condition a name and a theory. The name is the constitutional transition deficit, and the theory is that Ghana has completed the formal or textual stage of its constitutional transition in criminal justice while leaving the substantive and institutional stages substantially unfinished. The formal stage was accomplished on 7 January 1993, when the Constitution came into force carrying with it an express declaration of its own supremacy and an equally express provision that any other law found to be inconsistent with it is void to the extent of the inconsistency. The substantive stage would require that every rule of criminal law and procedure that survived that moment be examined, and either justified, reinterpreted, amended, repealed or invalidated by reference to the constitutional order that now governs it. The institutional stage would require that the rights which the Constitution guarantees be given the statutory machinery, the resources and the administrative architecture without which they remain declarations rather than entitlements.