THE COMMISSIONER, CHRAJ & ORS v. GHANA NATIONAL FIRE SERVICE & ORS
2018
HIGH COURT
GHANA
CORAM
- HIS LORDSHIP ANTHONY K. YEBOAH, JA
Areas of Law
- Human Rights
- Employment Law
- Gender Discrimination
2018
HIGH COURT
GHANA
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
The 2nd and 3rd Applicants were unjustly dismissed from the Ghana National Fire Service under a discriminatory regulation. The court found that the regulation had no reasonable justification and violated their constitutional rights. The Applicants are to be reinstated and compensated for wrongful dismissal.
At stake in these judicial proceedings is the right to non-discrimination (that is, freedom from discrimination). This appears to be the first time the issue of discrimination on the ground of gender has come up for determination by this Human Rights Division of the High Court. Not much help is also available from our existing decisional law. Accordingly, resort to international human rights jurisprudence and that of other democratic jurisdictions will be necessary and, hopefully, helpful in the circumstances. We reach out for such jurisprudence only because the principles contained in the jurisprudence may usefully guide our decisions, but not because such jurisprudence contains rules that bind our decisions. In the process, we shall adopt tests and parameters that may help us to determine the existence of discrimination and the structure of what may not amount to reasonable justification for discrimination.
Article 2 (1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that:
"Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and to ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the present Covenant, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."
And, Article 26 of the Covenant provides that:
"All persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to the equal protection of the law. In this respect, the law shall prohibit any discrimination and guarantee to all persons equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."
In other words, State Parties to the ICCPR undertake to ensure that all citizens within their territories are entitled to "equal protection of the law" and, therefore, (1) are entitled to 'equal treatment' and (2) `protection from discrimination', particularly, "on any ground such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status."
At Article 1 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), it is provided that:
"For the purposes of the present Convention, the term "discrimination against women" shall mean any distinction