Law, Culture and Women's Inheritance Rights in ... - Leitner Center

Notwithstanding the significant work that the Legal Aid Board and CHRAJ are doing in
Ghana, as the cases above illustrate, many women have difficulty accessing legal assistance and
are therefore unable to enforce their rights under Law 111. We therefore recommend that the
government undertake to have its Legal Aid Board and CHRAJ lawyers travel within the various
regions conducting legal aid clinics and providing mediation to facilitate out-of-court resolution
of intestate cases. [FN388]
Here again, NGO efforts provide a model. Despite their limited resources, both FIDA and
WiLDAF have successfully sponsored traveling clinics that provide both legal aid and legal
literacy training. [FN389] The Legal Officers of the SNV/WiLDAF Legal Awareness
Programmes currently travel to remote areas, spending several days handling the backlog of
intestate succession cases. [FN390] Since the Government already employs lawyers *339 trained
to do this work at both the Legal Aid Board and CHRAJ, it could readily duplicate the traveling
clinics model. Although such a program would not fully address the problem, it could expand
significantly women's access to even minimal legal advice and promote awareness of Law 111
within remote communities.
3. Mediation and Local Adjudication
In addition to legal advice, women need local access to forums where their rights can be
determined fairly in accordance with Law 111. In view of both limited resources and popular
reluctance to turn to courts to resolve family disputes, mediation may represent the best option
for providing such a forum. Indeed, both the Legal Aid Board and CHRAJ already attempt to
resolve intestate succession cases using mediation. [FN391] Moreover, in the past, lawyers with
quasi-judicial capacity have been appointed to assist the Registrar of Court to settle noncontested
issues, such as, non-contested grants of letters of administration. [FN392] Precedents
therefore exist in Ghana for the use of informal dispute resolution outside of courts. The use of
mediation not only can reduce cost and delay but also may encourage compliance because of its
less formal, less adversarial format. Nevertheless, in order for a system of mediation effectively
to promote compliance with Law 111, the mediators must be fully trained regarding the
requirements of the law and must be obliged to reach a resolution that comports with those
requirements. Absent such a mandate, mediators may actually contribute to the *340 pressure on
women to accept less than their legal share of the estate in the interest of resolving the dispute.
4. Law Enforcement
Ghana's failure to ensure that members of the police department enforce the criminal
provisions of Law 111, making it an offense to eject a surviving spouse from her matrimonial
home or to interfere with her use of the property, violates its obligations under international law
by denying women equal protection of the law. The Government has responded to this problem
by creating special Women and Juvenile Units in the police departments in Accra and Kumasi to
enforce the provisions of Law 111 and to handle other cases pertaining to the protection of
women and children.
These units are relatively new and assessing their effectiveness is difficult. Nevertheless, the
effort to concentrate even limited resources on the particular problems of women and children is
an important step toward providing effective police protection for these groups. At the same
time, the creation of special units risks marginalizing the needs of women and children and