The paradox of legal aid in Ghana

The Legal Aid Board for the whole of Greater Accra, which constitutes some three million people, employs only two lawyers - and one of those is on secondment from the Attorney General’s office.  However, the office is not overrun with people seeking help, few of those who do require legal assistance are turned away, and indeed, for much of the day the office seems rather quiet.

This was the same thing that struck me when I was at the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice: where is everybody?  When I volunteered at a west London law centre, we were inundated by people requesting help and received far more cases than we could possibly handle.  And yet here, where there is an apparent paucity of free legal representation, the demand appears to be low – satiable even by the minimal provision which exists.  How can this be so?  These are my initial hypotheses:

1) Demand is low because supply is low – people know that free legal advice and representation is not readily available, and perhaps believe it to be even scarcer than it is, and therefore simply do not seek it out.

2) The demand is dispersed and thus invisible: there is a multiplicity of NGOs and charities in Ghana which provide some sort of help in the legal field and needy applicants are divided up between them.  There is therefore no way of assessing the real need.

3) The demand is dispersed and, in that way, satisfied: this multiplicity of NGOs and charities manages to meet the demand for legal assistance, albeit in a more haphazard way than that to which we are accustomed in the UK.

4) Demand is low: problems and disputes are solved through informal and/or customary channels such as chieftaincies and people do not need/want formal legal assistance.

I plan to visit many more organisations during my time in Ghana; hopefully as I gain more experience of legal provision I will be able better to explain – or explain away – what strikes me presently as a very strange incongruity.