Day 12 - FIDA and DOVVSU

Today I visited two different organisations – the International Federation of Women Lawyers and the Domestic Violence Victim Support Unit.

The International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA – no, I don’t get it either) is an NGO which, according to their Mission Statement, “is committed to addressing discrimination in society by promoting and protecting the rights of women, children, and the vulnerable”.  Its work includes giving legal advice, conducting mediations, public education, and campaigning.  It addresses issues such as sexual assault, the representation of women in politics, child abuse, forced marriage, slavery, child maintenance, marital problems, and living with HIV (I found out today the shocking fact that 68% of women in sub-Saharan Africa are HIV positive).  Unfortunately, FIDA doesn’t have the funding to take cases on to court.  Lawyers volunteer to give initial legal advice but if a client needs help beyond this, it has to be paid for.

I sat in on a legal clinic, in which a succession of clients were given advice or took part in a mediation.  The cases I observed concerned a family dispute over property, a wife’s entitlement to assets of her late husband, child maintenance, and marital issues.  The mediations took a similar form as those I witnessed at the Legal Aid Board, with first the claimant then the respondent stating their case.  This is an effective, and I believe very widely used, structure, but it is vulnerable to abuse: one party today took it as an opportunity to recount almost everything that had ever happened to him, resisting all attempts to get him to come to the point.  It did also strike me that, despite this very formulaic beginning, after the opening statements there is a danger of the mediation descending into a free-for-all. This tendency is perhaps partly due to the fact that, in Ghana, mediations don’t seem to include private meetings between the mediator and individual parties, as would happen in the UK.  This may be due to time and space constraints, but these private meetings would be useful in providing each party with breathing space and in breaking up what can otherwise be a very lengthy confrontation. 

The FIDA offices

The Domestic Violence Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) is a unit of the police which deals with domestic violence offences.  I met today with the superintendent of DOVVSU and one of the police prosecutors.  DOVVSU handles domestic abuse cases from start to finish.  Complainants are initially directed to the Complaints Unit; their case is then passed on to investigating officers for preparation; and the brief, or docket, is then presented in court by a police prosecutor.  

It was extremely interesting talking to the police prosecutor.  These officers prosecute all crimes in Ghana apart from rape and murder, which are handled by lawyers from the Attorney-General’s office.  There is no independent state prosecution service, apart from the Attorney-General.  I can appreciate how having the police prosecute crimes may be more efficient, but it seems to me that there are two problems with this system.  Firstly, an independent prosecution service helps ensure that only appropriate cases are prosecuted and provides a check on the work of the police.  Secondly, police prosecutors are not trained lawyers, yet they are doing the work of – and alongside – counsel.  It is surely just as important for the state to be adequately represented as it is for the defendant, but there is a potential imbalance here.