The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has descended heavily on Chief Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie over recent comments insinuating a backing for the Executive led by President John Dramani Mahama.
Chief Justice Baffoe-Bonnie is said to have branded the current government and its appointed Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of having performed better than the eight years of the NPP administration.
“Let it be stated plainly: this is not the language of a Chief Justice,” the NPP stressed in a press release issued by General Secretary Justin Kodua Frimpong.
“It is the language of a party propagandist, of a kind exclusively reserved for NDC communicators and serial callers, and it has no place whatsoever in the mouth of the head of Ghana’s Judiciary.”
It noted that the Constitution clothes the CJ with powers to be neutral in the administration of justice.
“A Chief Justice who travels and celebrates as a courtier of the Executive cannot thereafter sit as a neutral umpire in cases to which the Executive is a party,” the press release insisted.
“He has presented himself not as the impartial head of an independent Judiciary but as a leading member of the National Democratic Congress in judicial robes, and if political commentary is his true vocation, he should resign forthwith and formally take up membership of the NDC, where such contributions are handsomely rewarded.”
It further stressed that by word and deed the Chief Justice has shut the door of justice against every Ghanaian who fails to support the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the President.
“We therefore demand that the Chief Justice immediately and unreservedly retract his partisan commentary and his vow of loyalty to the President’s agenda or, failing that, resign forthwith and formally join the NDC, whose cause he has chosen to champion from the Bench and that the President immediately fill the Council of State vacancy and publicly disavow any arrangement touching the Chief Justice’s post-retirement future.
“The courtroom is the last refuge of the ordinary Ghanaian, and the NPP will resist its conversion
into an instrument of political persecution with every lawful means at our disposal. History will record who stood where when the independence of Ghana’s courts was put to the test.”