By Richard DABLAH{Email: richard.dablah@gmail.com}
On September 1, 2025, Ghana carried out an act of stark constitutional gravity: the removal of Chief Justice Gertrude Araba Esaaba Sackey Torkornoo. The formal steps were followed: petitions, a prima facie assessment, a committee, and a presidential action. Formal compliance, however, is only the beginning of a republic’s work. Constitutions earn the public’s allegiance not simply by obedience to procedure but by securing public confidence in why those procedures were used. That is the difference between law that governs and law that convinces.
Legality is straightforward here. Article 146 supplies a calibrated procedure: the President, after consulting the Council of State, appoints a five-person committee to investigate allegations of misbehaviour. The committee must include two Supreme Court justices and three lay members who are neither members of Parliament nor the Council, and who are not lawyers. The design limits insularity in judicial discipline and signals a communal check on the legal guild. The committee found cause; the President acted. On the paperwork, the state satisfied its constitutional checklist.
Legitimacy, however, asks a higher question: why should citizens accept that this particular action was necessary? Legal sufficiency does not automatically convert into democratic sufficiency. When the guardian of the constitution is unseated, the republic owes the public more than a declaration; it owes an accounting that shows why lesser measures would not restore trust and why removal was proportionate.
To judge necessity in a constitutional order we need three disciplined tests.
First, duty-based necessity. If the evidence proves conduct incompatible with judicial office, removal is not discretionary; it is required. Judges must be beyond the reach of conduct that compromises impartial adjudication or that corrupts the administration of justice. The robe cannot be a shield for actions that make the office untenable.
Second, outcome-based necessity. Even where misconduct exists, proportionality matters. Censure, supervised recusal, reassignment, or institutional reforms may repair confidence at lower civic cost. Removal is the nuclear option. A calm state selects it only when no credible alternative will restore the bench’s authority.
Third, systemic necessity. The method by which an apex judge is removed shapes the future. If the process is read as partisan, the judiciary becomes cautious or captured; if it is read as opaque, the bench loses symbolic capital and public obedience to law grows thin. Political actors will learn what the system rewards. Democracies must avoid establishing rituals that make judicial heads cheap.
On the public record available to citizens, those three tests have not been satisfied in a way that commands public conviction. The suspension on April 22, 2025 and the removal on September 1, 2025 are facts. The former Chief Justice denies the allegations and characterizes them as politically motivated. The committee’s finding of misbehaviour is decisive in legal terms. But the substantive reasons, the evidentiary narrative, and the accounting of proportionality remain largely unseen by the public. When reasons are withheld, legitimacy suffers even if legality stands.
This concern is not abstract. Ghana’s modern constitutional story is a hard-won apprenticeship. From cycles of coups in the twentieth century to the 1992 settlement, institutions have been rebuilt with patience and restraint. Article 146 itself reflects that history: it is designed to make removals rare and to make them withstand scrutiny. When prior controversies over independent officeholders became clouded in secrecy, the result was not only contested verdicts but the erosion of institutional trust that takes generations to rebuild. Publishing reasons, even in redacted form, converts a constitutional act into a credible polity action. Withholding them converts it into grievance.
Social authority depends on perception. Max Weber taught that law’s power rests on belief that commands are rightful. Pierre Bourdieu showed how institutions accumulate symbolic capital that makes unpopular judgments accepted. A removal experienced by citizens as a black box spends that capital quickly. Citizens will come to see the courts as instruments of political choreography rather than as impartial arbiters of rights. When the appearance of fairness is lost, compliance becomes reluctant and fragile.
Political theory carries a similar warning. Carl Schmitt wrote that sovereigns are revealed in the exception. Liberal constitutionalism’s response, from Madison to contemporary deliberative theorists, is to cage exceptions in transparent procedures so they cannot metastasize into ordinary practice. Suspension and removal, even when justified by secret evidence, can normalize an exceptional logic: if the state can remove when it chooses, then the separation of powers erodes not by a single dramatic amendment but by repeated acts that become precedent.
Comparative experience supports a simple policy truth: transparency inoculates. Jurisdictions across South Asia and Southern Africa that publish reasoned summaries of disciplinary findings, with privacy redaction where necessary, have managed to discipline judges while protecting institutional trust. Ghana already has structural safeguards in Article 146: mixed committee composition and Council of State consultation. What is missing in practice in this episode is the public-facing justification that converts technical compliance into democratic conviction.
Facts that anchor this judgment are confined and uncomplicated. Suspension occurred on April 22, 2025 after petitions and a prima facie assessment. A committee was constituted, it reported that misbehaviour had occurred, and the President removed the Chief Justice on September 1, 2025. The former Chief Justice rejects the committee’s findings. Those elements are not in dispute; their meaning is.
So where does necessity stand? If the committee’s record shows conduct that any reasonable observer would see as incompatible with judicial office and if it explains why lesser measures would not suffice, then removal was necessary in the fullest sense. If that record exists but remains secret, the state has missed an opportunity to make necessity visible. Absent published reasons that justify proportionality, the act reads as lawful but not yet necessary.
There is a practical remedy that respects fairness and strengthens legitimacy. Publish a reasoned summary of the committee’s findings, an outline of the evidence framework and the reasons why censure or other measures would not have sufficed. Protect privacy and due process with narrowly tailored redactions; do not hide the logic by hiding the facts. Reform practice so petitions are served on the subject before Council of State referral, set minimum response times, and publish the issues in dispute. Raise the screening threshold for petitions to filter frivolous claims while preserving access for genuine complaints. Adopt a convention that one lay committee member be a publicly respected ethicist or retired auditor general figure whose independence is demonstrable. Time-bound the process with public milestones so opacity cannot hide indeterminate delay.
Ghana has a choice. It can treat this episode as an administrative resolution and move on, or it can repair the deficit of legitimacy by making reasons public enough for citizens to see why a guardian of the constitution had to be removed. The republic’s health depends on that choice.
Fiat justitia, ruat caelum.
