GOGO just read “The Legal Vacation” in The Gold Coast Leader of December 24–31, 1922.

GOGO just read “The Legal Vacation” in The Gold Coast Leader of December 24–31, 1922. Yes. 1922!

The article reported that the Legal Vacation, which began on December 19, would extend to the end of January. During that period, motions could apparently be taken with the consent of both parties.

The Gold Coast Leader was not impressed.

It noted that most of the judges had already been away on furlough (authorized leave from their colonial postings) for some months during the year. Having regard to what it described as the “very congested state of legal business” in the courts, the newspaper said “We should have thought that the Judges would have dispensed with this holiday.”

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Then came the sentence that should make us uncomfortable 104 years later: “We are not convinced that the great anxiety of litigants to get their cases settled through the Courts is shared equally by the Judges.”

Think about what the newspaper was saying.

These were white colonial judges serving in the Gold Coast. They had taken their furloughs while the cases of Gold Coast litigants remained on congested court lists. The newspaper questioned whether the judges shared the same urgency as the litigants waiting for justice.

It complained about the tendency of white “Government officials” to take their holidays without sufficient regard to whether they had given a full tour’s work to the country that provided their “bread and butter.” It warned against the same attitude prevailing among “His Majesty’s Judges.”

Its proposed solution was equally revealing: the head of the Judiciary should arrange matters so that the taking of a judge’s leave would depend upon reducing the cases on the list to a reasonable level.

In other words, even in 1922, a newspaper in colonial Gold Coast understood that the administration of justice must be organized around the needs of litigants, not merely the convenience of those who administer it.

One could at least understand the newspaper’s suspicion in 1922. These were colonial judges serving far away from their own country. Perhaps, as The Gold Coast Leader suspected, they did not experience the anxiety of the Gold Coast litigant with the same intensity as the litigant whose liberty, property or livelihood depended on the court.

But what explains 2026? The white judges, His Majesty’s Judges, the colonial government, and the Gold Coast are all gone. These are now our judges, our courts, our litigants, and our cases.

Yet the institutional response remains remarkably familiar: the vacation survives while the caseload balloons.

That is what makes this little 1922 article so haunting. Independence changed who sits on the Bench. But on this question, did we sufficiently change the institutional mindset?

Why should an independent Republic still have to ask, 104 years later, whether those who administer justice share the litigant’s anxiety to have his case determined?

Why Are We Still Observing This Colonial Tradition?

Why must an independent Ghana in 2026 continue a court-vacation tradition inherited from a colonial judicial system?Tradition cannot be its own justification.

Decolonization cannot simply mean replacing white judges with Ghanaian judges while preserving every institutional arrangement inherited from the white judges.

We inherited many institutions from colonial rule. Some remain useful. Some have been adapted. Others should have disappeared long ago.

The test should be: Does this inherited practice serve the Ghanaian people today?

Our Superior Courts now carry a pending backlog of nearly 30,000 unresolved cases, with the High Court accounting for more than 83% of that total.

Successive Chief Justices have, of course, constituted vacation courts pursuant to the rules. But that itself raises the question: why are we managing around the Legal Vacation rather than asking whether trial courts need a Legal Vacation at all?

Perhaps it is time to stop tinkering around the edges.

Trial Courts Should Not Go On Vacation

Judges, like everyone who works, must be entitled to reasonable annual leave. Nobody seriously disputes that. So the issue is not whether judges should rest. The issue is whether the courts themselves must go on vacation.

There is a fundamental difference between individual annual leave and an institutional Legal Vacation.

People need vacations. Institutions do not.

Modern institutions routinely arrange individual leave without shutting themselves down. This is not a revolutionary administrative challenge.

Stagger the leave. Rotate the judges. Rotate the court staff. And keep the courts functioning.

To the extent that the Rules of Court Committee concludes that some form of Legal Vacation remains necessary, it should be tailored principally to the appellate courts and, even there, staggered to ensure continuity.

Appellate courts are different. Much of their work involves records, briefs, legal research, conferences and judgment writing. Significant judicial work can continue away from the courtroom.

Trial courts are different. They are the engine room of justice. Trials require people to come together. The judge must sit. Counsel must appear. Witnesses must testify. Evidence must be received. Cross-examination must take place. Accused persons must be produced.

When trial courts stop, cases stop. And when criminal cases stop, the consequences are not borne by an abstraction called “the docket.”

Someone remains on remand. Someone remains on bail with criminal charges hanging over his head. A victim continues waiting. A witness’s memory fades. Evidence becomes harder to retrieve. Families remain in uncertainty.

Justice delayed is lived by actual people. And in criminal cases, delay can strike directly at the liberty protections guaranteed by the Constitution.

This is where the position of the Ghana Bar Association becomes particularly difficult to understand. The GBA has emphasized lawyers’ vacations, travel arrangements, availability, closed chambers and healthy work-life balance in objecting to judges continuing part-heard criminal trials during the Legal Vacation.

These are legitimate personal and professional concerns.

But consider the extraordinary contrast. In 1922, The Gold Coast Leader centred the litigant. In 2026, the GBA’s intervention centres the lawyer.

How did a newspaper in colonial Gold Coast understand 104 years ago that the central concern should be the “great anxiety of litigants to get their cases settled through the Courts,” while the organized Bar of an independent Ghana emphasizes lawyers’ vacations, travel arrangements and closed chambers?

The question is not whether lawyers deserve vacations. Of course they do.

The question is: Whose interest should prevail when the lawyer’s vacation collides with the client’s liberty and right to have his case determined?

A criminal defence lawyer does not merely possess a diary. The lawyer holds a brief. Behind that brief is a human being whose liberty, reputation and future may be at stake.

Imagine the accused person is on remand. The judge is ready. The prosecution is ready. The witnesses are ready. The accused wants his trial to continue.

Can counsel properly say: It is August. I am observing the Legal Vacation. Your liberty can wait until October?

Whose interest is being protected? And how is that consistent with counsel’s professional obligation to represent and protect the interests of the client?

Lawyers should take vacations. But they must organize their vacations around their professional obligations. A lawyer’s vacation arrangements cannot become an entitlement to suspend the client’s case.

And perhaps something that ought to be obvious now needs to be memorialized expressly in our Rules of Court: The Legal Vacation is a vacation of the courts. It is not an annual-leave entitlement conferred on lawyers.

Lawyers are not employees of the Judicial Service. The judicial calendar does not confer on every lawyer a two-month personal holiday.

A lawyer’s vacation is a matter for the lawyer, the chambers and the client. It cannot become a veto over a properly constituted court’s decision to continue a part-heard criminal trial or indeed any trial.

But perhaps, in a country increasingly afflicted by an entitlement cult, the obvious must now be written down.

There is a deeper constitutional principle here. Justice emanates from the people. The courts do not exist for judges, lawyers, or court administrators.

Judges, lawyers and court staff are indispensable participants in the administration of justice. But the justice system ultimately exists for the people.

That should determine how we organize it. No serious institution closes merely because its workers need annual leave. It organizes their leave and continues serving the public.

Why should the engine room of justice be different?

And somehow this issue has even acquired partisan colours. Political parties are perfectly entitled to take positions on the administration of justice. But the underlying principle is not partisan.

There is no NDC right to a speedy trial. There is no NPP right to a speedy trial. There is no Government right to liberty and Opposition right to liberty.

The principle remains the same regardless of who occupies Jubilee House and who sits on the Opposition benches:

The convenience of those who administer justice cannot take precedence over the rights of those for whom justice is administered.

And so we return to The Gold Coast Leader. In 1922, it complained about congested courts and judges taking holidays despite that congestion. It wondered whether judges shared the anxiety of litigants desperate to have their cases determined. And the judges it was complaining about were white colonial judges.

One hundred and four years later, the historical irony should trouble us.

The white judges left.

The colonial flag came down.

His Majesty’s Judges became judges of our Republic.

His Majesty’s Courts became our courts.

The colonial subjects became citizens from whom justice emanates.

But the Legal Vacation stayed.

And, even more remarkably, the old question stayed with it:

Do those who administer justice share the litigant’s urgency to have his case determined?

That is the indictment contained in this little newspaper article from 1922.

The tragedy is not that we inherited the Legal Vacation from the colonial judiciary. We inherited many things.

The tragedy is that, more than a century later, with our own judges administering justice in our own courts for our own people, we are still struggling with the very complaint that Gold Coast litigants made about their colonial courts.

The personnel changed.

The flag changed.

The Republic arrived.

But did the institutional mindset change enough?

Surely the answer cannot be another century of anxious litigants waiting for the convenience of those who serve them.

The obvious solution is to keep the trial courts, the engine room of justice, working throughout the year.

The Gold Coast is history.

Perhaps its Legal Vacation should be too.

People may vacation. Justice must not.