When Ghana suspended Chief Justice Gertrude Torkornoo in April 2025, I argued that the episode exposed a deeper fragility in the country’s judiciary. The concern was not that a chief justice should be immune from accountability. It was whether Ghana could hold its most senior judge accountable without turning the process into another arena for partisan competition.
More than a year later, we have considerably more evidence with which to answer that question. Torkornoo was removed from office on 1 September 2025 after a committee established under Article 146 of Ghana’s Constitution found that the necessary grounds of stated misbehaviour had been established and recommended her removal.
The inquiry was substantial. On the first petition, the committee heard 13 witnesses for the petitioner. Torkornoo testified, was cross-examined and called 12 witnesses of her own. The committee also received about 10,000 pages of documentary exhibits.
The legal challenges have now largely run their course. On 24 June 2026, the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice dismissed Torkornoo’s human-rights claims arising from her suspension and removal. On 2 July, Ghana’s Supreme Court unanimously dismissed consolidated constitutional challenges relating to the removal process. These decisions matter. But they do not mean that the concerns about judicial independence raised by Torkornoo’s removal have disappeared.
The courts have answered important legal questions
When Torkornoo was first suspended, important questions remained about the allegations against her, whether she would receive a fair opportunity to answer them, and whether constitutional procedures would constrain political actors. Those uncertainties justified scrutiny of an unprecedented process involving a sitting Ghanaian Chief Justice.
The intervening months have answered some of those questions, though not all of them.
The committee investigated the first petition and recommended Torkornoo’s removal. Under Article 146 of Ghana’s Constitution, proceedings must be held in camera, the judge concerned is entitled to defend herself personally or through a lawyer or other expert, and the President must act in accordance with the committee’s recommendation.
Torkornoo nevertheless challenged aspects of the process through Ghanaian courts and ultimately before the ECOWAS Court, the regional court in Abuja.
The ECOWAS judgment is particularly important, but its significance should not be overstated. The regional court was not sitting as an appellate tribunal to determine afresh whether the Article 146 committee reached the correct conclusions about Torkornoo’s conduct. It considered whether the process violated rights protected under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The Court affirmed its jurisdiction but found that Torkornoo had failed to establish violations of her rights to a fair hearing, work, dignity or information, among the other claims she advanced.
Ghana’s Supreme Court subsequently dealt with the domestic constitutional challenges. On 2 July 2026, a seven-member panel unanimously dismissed the consolidated cases, bringing the principal domestic constitutional litigation over the removal process to an end.
These outcomes make it considerably harder to sustain, as a legal proposition, the claim that Torkornoo was simply removed through an unconstitutional presidential purge. But constitutional validity is not synonymous with institutional resilience.
The deeper problem remains
Ghana’s Constitution deliberately makes removing a Chief Justice difficult. Article 146 restricts removal to stated misbehaviour, incompetence or incapacity and prescribes a special procedure when the petition concerns the Chief Justice. The President, acting in consultation with the Council of State, appoints a five-member committee comprising two Supreme Court justices and three non-lawyers who are neither parliamentarians nor members of the Council of State. The committee investigates and recommends whether removal should occur.
Those protections matter. Yet the Torkornoo episode demonstrates how politically combustible this architecture can become when it operates within Ghana’s intensely competitive two-party system. Torkornoo was appointed Chief Justice under the NPP government of Nana Akuffo-Addo. Her removal occurred after the NDC returned to power under John Mahama. That sequence does not establish that her removal was partisan. Indeed, the committee proceedings and subsequent judicial decisions make such a conclusion difficult to sustain without additional evidence.
The problem is instead institutional.
A process may comply with constitutional rules in one case while revealing vulnerabilities that could be exploited in another. Petitions against a Chief Justice inevitably place the presidency, Council of State and judiciary in an extraordinarily sensitive relationship. Once judicial appointments and removals are interpreted through the lens of political alternation, even legally defensible decisions risk deepening perceptions that the judiciary changes with the government of the day.
This is why the question extends beyond Torkornoo. The test of Article 146 is not only whether it was properly applied to one Chief Justice accused of misconduct. It is whether its safeguards are strong enough to prevent a future government from using superficially similar procedures against a Chief Justice on weaker or politically motivated grounds.
Neither the ECOWAS Court nor Ghana’s Supreme Court could settle that broader institutional question simply by deciding the legal claims before them.
Accountability and independence are not opposites
There is also a danger in drawing the wrong lesson from the controversy. Judicial independence cannot mean judicial immunity. Judges exercise enormous public power. Credible allegations of misconduct or abuse of office must be capable of investigation, including when they concern the Chief Justice. A system incapable of holding senior judges accountable would itself undermine public confidence in the judiciary.
The challenge is therefore not to make removal impossible. It is to ensure that mechanisms designed for accountability cannot easily become mechanisms of political control. The Torkornoo episode provides an opportunity to examine whether Ghana’s constitutional safeguards are sufficiently robust at each stage. The threshold for establishing a prima facie case, the meaning of “stated misbehaviour”, the protections surrounding suspension, the balance between the Constitution’s requirement for in-camera proceedings and legitimate demands for public confidence, and the procedural protections available to the officeholder.
These questions matter because constitutional institutions survive not simply through written rules but through the restraint with which political actors exercise the powers those rules give them. Ghana has now demonstrated that a Chief Justice can be investigated and removed through Article 146, and that the resulting process can survive substantial scrutiny before domestic and regional courts.
That is significant. But the more demanding test lies ahead. Ghana must demonstrate that the same constitutional machinery cannot become a convenient instrument for governments seeking to reshape the judiciary when political power changes hands. Torkornoo’s legal battle may be over. The question her removal exposed is not. The durability of Ghana’s judicial independence will depend on whether the country can preserve the distinction between holding judges accountable and making judges politically vulnerable.
Dr. Michael Asiedu is a Fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), University of Ghana, and an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Political Science, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. This article was written during his MIASA fellowship as part of his research on judicial autonomy and political power in Africa. The research leading to these results has received funding from the Maria Sibylla Merian Centres Programme of the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, Germany, under the grant no. [01 UK2624A], with the University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, Ghana, as co-funder of the MIASA fellowship.
