Ghana’s President John Mahama has fired the country’s Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo following a recommendation by an inquiry.
She had been on suspension since April after complaints were lodged against her in petitions by three individuals, with the president setting up a five-member committee to investigate.
The commission found that “grounds of stated misbehaviour… had been established and recommended her removal from office”, the presidency said in a statement on Monday. Ms Torkornoo has dismissed the allegations as unfounded and politically motivated.
The presidency said Mahama was required to act in accordance with the committee’s recommendations.
To arrive at its conclusion, the panel reviewed 10,000 pages of evidence from 13 witnesses on behalf of petitioner Daniel Ofori. The chief justice also testified and called 12 other witnesses, including experts.
The two other petitions have not been concluded.
Ms Torkornoo, Ghana’s third female chief justice, was nominated in 2023 by former President Nana Akufo-Addo.
She is the first sitting chief justice to be investigated and dismissed.
Chief justices in Ghana enjoy security of tenure – meaning they can only be removed from office on a few grounds, which include incompetence and misbehaviour.
In April, the opposition New Patriotic Party condemned her suspension at the time, describing it as a political witch hunt and an attempt to undermine judicial independence.
Multiple lawsuits challenging the removal process were unsuccessful.
She had previously survived a removal request under Akufo-Addo, who found the petition to have “several deficiencies”.
She had been accused of bias in some of her rulings by the current governing party, which was then in opposition.
A former deputy attorney general, Alfred Tuah-Yeboah, has criticised the decision to remove the chief justice saying it set a “dangerous precedent”, the AFP news agency reports.
“The petition that I read showed no proper grounds to warrant her removal… If the threshold is what we read in the petition, then I fear for the future of the judiciary,” he is quoted as saying.
