Twenty-Five Years On: Ghana's Fast Track High Court Between Speed and Suspicion

Ask the average Ghanaian what the "Fast Track Court" is, and the answer usually references speed: a court where cases move quickly, often reserved for high-profile matters. That popular impression is not wrong, but it hides a more complicated story — one that began with a genuine constitutional crisis, produced one of the narrowest and most contested Supreme Court rulings in Ghana's judicial history, and continues to raise legitimate governance questions about how justice is administered for a select few cases today.

ORIGINS OF AN INNOVATION

The Fast Track High Court (FTHC) was created in March 2001 by the then Chief Justice, using his administrative authority under Article 139(3) of the 1992 Constitution to establish a specialised division of the High Court, equipped with modern technology such as digital audio recording, intended to resolve selected cases more expeditiously than the conventional docket. It was, on paper, a case-management reform aimed at reducing the chronic delays that have long plagued Ghana's civil and criminal justice system.

The innovation was tested almost immediately. Tsatsu Tsikata, the former Chief Executive of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, challenged the FTHC's constitutionality after being brought before it on criminal charges. His legal team argued that nothing in the 1992 Constitution or the Courts Act contemplated the creation of an entirely new court by administrative fiat; that Article 139(3)'s reference to "divisions" of the High Court meant only the long-established geographical or territorial divisions, not a new species of court with its own distinct rules of procedure; and that the Chief Justice's sole discretion over which cases were assigned to the FTHC lacked any objective statutory criteria.

A DIVIDED BENCH

The result was extraordinary. In April 2002, a five-justice majority of the Supreme Court agreed with Tsikata, ruling that the FTHC was unknown to the Constitution because it had not been established through due legislative process. But barely two months later, on 26 June 2002, an enlarged eleven-member bench reviewed that decision and reversed it by a razor-thin 6–5 majority, holding the FTHC constitutional after all. The dissenting minority, which included the sitting Chief Justice himself, maintained that the Chief Justice had no power to create a new division of the High Court without parliamentary backing. That a matter of this constitutional significance turned on a single vote — twice, in opposite directions — signalled just how genuinely unsettled the legal community was, and in some respects remains, about the FTHC's foundations.

THE CASE FOR THE FAST TRACK MODEL

Proponents of the FTHC point to real gains. High-profile commercial disputes, complex financial crime prosecutions, and cases with significant public interest have historically suffered the most from Ghana's case backlog, sometimes dragging on for a decade or more in the ordinary system. A specialised division with modern recording technology, dedicated case managers, and judges freed from an overloaded general docket can, in principle, deliver faster, better-documented outcomes. The model also reflects a broader and largely uncontroversial trend across common law jurisdictions of creating specialised court divisions — commercial courts, land courts, and financial courts among them — to match judicial expertise and resources to case complexity.

THE CASE FOR CAUTION

The concerns run deeper than procedural nostalgia. First, the constitutional question was never resolved with anything approaching consensus; a 6–5 outcome is barely a majority at all, and the dissent's core argument — that new courts require parliamentary, not administrative, creation — has never been fully answered by subsequent legislation formalising the FTHC's status. Second, because the Chief Justice retains discretion over which cases are routed to the FTHC, critics have long argued that the process lacks transparent, published criteria, inviting perceptions that politically sensitive or high-profile cases receive different treatment — faster or, at times, more scrutinised handling — than similar matters left on the general docket. Third, and perhaps most tellingly, comparative legal research on Ghana's judicial system has observed that in practice, the Fast Track courts eventually became nearly as slow as the traditional courts they were meant to outpace, suggesting that speed gains from technology alone are not sustainable without matching investment in staffing, case-flow management, and enforcement discipline across the entire High Court, not just a favoured division.

GOVERNANCE LESSONS

For a country still building durable trust in its institutions, the FTHC's twenty-five-year history offers a useful governance lesson: judicial reforms that improve efficiency for a subset of cases must not come at the cost of equal treatment for the rest of the system, and administrative innovations of constitutional consequence are more durable when anchored in clear legislation rather than discretionary practice. Ghana does not need to abandon the Fast Track model; it needs to formalise it — with published, objective case-assignment criteria, parliamentary or constitutional grounding beyond judicial administrative practice, and a renewed investment plan that extends fast, well-resourced justice to the ordinary High Court docket rather than treating speed as a privilege reserved for a select category of cases.

Justice delayed is justice denied, but justice that is fast for some and slow for the rest raises its own, quieter question about equal protection under the law.

Rexford Adjei Darko
Public Relations Practitioner, Governance & AI Advocate and CSR Researcher.

[email protected] | +233 244 769 456 | +66 065 973 3550