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Tamale, Ghana – Legal Resources Centre (LRC), non-profit legal advocacy organisation based in Accra, has trained six Citizen Monitoring Group (CMG) members from six selected districts in the Northern Region.
The one day training workshop held in Tamale on Wednesday was in response to the 2018 Integrated Criminal Justice Case-Tracking System (CTS) project launched by the government to support key stakeholders in the justice delivery system to collect, collate and harmonise statistical data for effective justice delivery.
The CTS project which is being supported by the USAID is to enable key actors in the justice delivery system including the police, prisons, judiciary, attorney general’s department and legal aid commission, to electronically access and track the various stages of criminal cases from the point of arrest, investigation, prosecution, conviction, rehabilitation and release.
To institutionalise and sustain the effective implementation of the CTS therefore requires civil society organisations to play oversight role in ensuring that the system is being used and there exists effective coordination among stakeholder institutions.
To this end, the LRC has been awarded a cooperative agreement to implement a 3 year Activity with funding support from the USAID. The activity which is being implemented in partnership with the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) Africa office and in collaboration with Crime Check Foundation is dubbed “USAID Justice Sector Support Activity”.
The JSS Activity which is being implemented in forty districts in seven regions including the Northern Region, aims at ensuring that marginalised communities through mobilisation and innovative public education programmes are aware of and supported to track progress of the delivery of the CTS, a software system aimed at employing technology solutions to track criminal cases from their inception until conviction, discharge and or acquittal.
In line with the aforementioned, the LRC through the JSS Activity is mobilising CMGs to monitor the CTS process, facilitate demand for its functionality, accountability and responsiveness by the justice sector key actors using the CTS.
According to Enock Jengre, Rule of Law Specialist with LRC, CMGs are a group of individuals or institutions drawn from non-state institutions including civil society organizations, community based organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and community radio stations among others to monitor, advocate and demand for improved service delivery within the justice space.
The Tamale workshop, he explained, was to take the CMG members through the CTS and its objectives, the key actors involved in the JSS Activity and what is expected of them as CMG members.
Among others, the CMG members would serve as the partnership’s primary contact in the designated regions and districts, visit the key actors in the selected project regions and districts to monitor the use of the CTS as well as produce and submit periodic reports generated from monitoring of CTS to the JSS Activity Team.
The six CMGs came from Bimbilla in the Nanumba North District, Gushegu Municipality, Savelugu Municipality, Tamale Metropolitan Assembly, Yendi Municipality and Kumbungu District. They are expected to also go back to their communities and train citizens from other institutions on the relevance of the CTS.
By SavannahNewsOnline.Com/Philip Liebs
