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The two Deputy Ministers-designate for Justice and Attorney General, have backed the President’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor to strictly prosecute cases of corruption in public office to free the Attorney General the burden of handling such cases.

Mr Godfred Yeboah Dame and Mr Joseph Dindiok Kpemka who appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Wednesday, expressed optimism that the appointment of a special prosecutor would help to expeditiously dispense justice delivery in the country.

Special Prosecutor

Mr Dame who was the first to appear before the committee said the special prosecutor, when appointed, would be required to undertake special prosecution in matters of corruption in public office among other issues instead of the current arrangement where the AG was expected to play that role which effectively made it difficult to prosecute members of the government.

Answering questions from a wide range of issues, the nominee who spoke about the backlog of students who could not make it to the Ghana Law School for want of physical space said the situation arose because of the expansion of the law degree programme and also the manner in which legal education was regulated.

He explained that the situation would soon be a thing of the past when two more campuses were opened in Accra to absorb more students.

More campuses

Mr Dame indicated that the Law School had acquired a vast land called the law village at Legon to build more campuses and said he had the interest in assisting his minister, if approved, to obtain funding to prosecute the project.

To further solve the difficulty, he called for the demystification of law education by establishing campuses in all the regional capitals to cater for students in that part of the country who aspired to read law.

Asked what recommendations he could make to advance freedom of speech and media freedom in Ghana, Mr Dame, who himself is an advocate of press freedom, expressed concern about the heavy fines imposed on media organisations by the courts.

Such heavy fines, he noted, was a subtle way of killing freedom of the media knowing that media institutions in the country lacked the requisite assets to pay such hefty fines.