THE REPUBLIC v. HIGH COURT, EX PARTE: JOSEPH DANSO
2015
SUPREME COURT
GHANA
CORAM
- AKUFFO (MS) JSC (PRESIDING)
- ANSAH JSC
- GBADEGBE JSC
- AKOTO- BAMFO (MRS) JSC
- BENIN JSC
Areas of Law
- Civil Procedure
2015
SUPREME COURT
GHANA
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
Applicants elected in NPP elections sought judicial review of a settlement-adopted judgment, insisting on the right to be heard. The Supreme Court refused, clarifying fair hearing applies to official parties, not pending joiners. Judges sanction lawful consensual agreements. Concurrences emphasized the same basis for refusal.
RULING
GBADEGBE JSC:
We have before us an application for judicial review in the nature of certiorari to be directed at the judgment and or decision of the High Court, Accra dated 29 August in a suit that concerns the parties herein numbered as BMISC 634/2014 and entitled Kwame Owusu Ansah and Others v the New Patriotic Party and Another. The grounds on which the application is brought are breach of the right to a fair hearing and what is described ‘as procedural impropriety’. The facts that gave rise to the application are shortly stated as follows:
Following the conduct of elections in some constituencies by the New Patriotic Party (NPP), some members of the party, feeling aggrieved by the processes leading to the election and the declaration of results in the Kumawu Constituency, petitioned the national headquarters of the party which annulled the elections and ordered a re-run. The first three interested parties herein subsequently lodged a claim before the High Court, Accra seeking an order confirming the annulment of the results. The plaintiffs in the said matter named the NPP and the Electoral Commission as defendants who were duly served with the processes and submitted themselves to the court by entering notices of appearance to the action. The applicants herein who were elected at the Kumawu elections having become aware of the pendency of the action before the High Court, Accra, applied to be joined to the action. Although the application was fixed for a specified date, when they realised that by the return date of the application for joinder they would have been prevented from taking part in the re-run elections and also on account of an interlocutory injunction granted restraining them from taking part in the said elections, the applicants herein sought an abridgement of time to have their application determined but this was refused by the court. In the course of the pendency of the action before the High Court and at a time when the application for joinder at their instance had been pending, the learned trial judge was informed in court on 29 August 2014, at the hearing of an application to vacate an order of interlocutory injunction, that the parties to the cause had reached a settlement. Having been so informed, the learned trial judge adopted the terms of the compromise as its judgment. It seems to us that notwithstanding the failure by the learned trial judge to clearly indicate on the face of the order which appears as the minutes of