GBA Prez disagrees with four lawyers

THE President of the Ghana Bar Association (GBA), Mr Frank Beecham, has expressed disagreement with four of his fellow lawyers who have accused judges and some members of staff of the Judicial Service of bribery and corruption without proof.
He, however, indicated that if the four who had been summoned to the General Legal Council were able to prove the allegations, they would become heroes.
Another senior member of the GBA, the Public Relations Officer (PRO), Mr Tony Forson, also indicated that he did not understand why his colleagues did not make use of the Complaints Committee set up by the association to take up cases of corruption on behalf of its members but chose to go public with those allegations.
Explaining the areas of their disagreement, the two senior lawyers told the Daily Graphic in an interview that the four lawyers, being opinion leaders whose actions made an impact on society, would have saved everybody the recent hullabaloo if they had reported or named those judges they allegedly accused, instead of making those blanket statements and, in the process, tarnishing the image of all judges.
They said the GBA had, in 2008, established a Complaints Committee with the objective of encouraging members to report cases of corruption within the Judiciary to enable the committee to tackle matters, without even mentioning the names of the complainants, but not even one complaint had been made to date.
Mr Beecham, who stressed that the association had not met on the issue, for which reason he was speaking as an individual, indicated that being lawyers who always relied on evidence, the four should not have fed into speculations that judges were corrupt, without any justification.
The four lawyers — Dr Raymond Atuguba, Mr David Annan, Mr Abraham Amaliba and Mr Laary Bimi — upheld the perception that the country’s judicial system was corrupt and stressed the need for the corrupt judges and staff of the Judicial Service to purge themselves of that perception.
They made the allegations during a roundtable discussion organised by the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) in Accra on April 8, 2011.
On the complaint by the National Executive Council of the Association of Magistrates and Judges of Ghana (AMJG) to the General Legal Council, Mr Forson said the association could have chosen the option of citing the four lawyers for contempt, adding that it behoved the four lawyers to come up with proof of their allegations.
He reiterated that it was wrong for the lawyers to make those sweeping statements which seemed to tarnish the image of all judges, pointing out that the fact that some judges were corrupt did not mean all judges were corrupt.
“As lawyers and opinion leaders whose utterances have a huge impact on other people, it is important to ensure that we always come up with facts,” he said.
On judges’ refusal to sit on a case in which Dr Atuguba is counsel, Mr Forson said under the circumstance, he could not blame the judges for their stance and added that until the matter was cleared, a client whose lawyer had allegedly accused judges of being corrupt might feel insecure before the same group of people.