By: Saidu Jalloh (Intern)
The Honorable Chief Justice, Desmond Babatunde Edwards has in a press release dated 23 August 2023, affirmed that he had assigned 23 judges to deal with 802 cases in the whole country in 2 weeks, starting today, Monday 28 August 2023.
This comes as a result to decongest the Correctional Centres across the country through the “ACCESS TO JUSTICE” Judicial Week that was organized by the Judiciary of Sierra Leone.
The 23 judges are expected to deal with 802 matters across the country of which 441 are in the capital and 361 are in the provinces. The Chief Justice in his statement identified those cases that would be handled by the judges across the country as a way to accelerate justice.
“Part of the total number cases to be handled include 189 cases for which the accused and victim have not been traced of that, of that number, 85 of them are sexual offenses. The no – trace cases are cases in which the accused person were admitted to bail with no trace of them or their sureties or the victims have compromised or adjourned the case,” the Chief Justice said.
The Chief Justice also stated that as part of the judiciary commitment to enhance access to justice, accused person would have the opportunity to be heard by the assigned judges with a view to bringing an end to their cases and or incarceration where they were trial inmates.
“Our responsibility is timely delivery of justice with speedy completion of all cases before our courts. Despite the administrative challenges and bottleneck, the judiciary must find way to mete out justice to those to those that fall foul to the law,” Chief Justice said.
He further added, “This Access to Justice through judicial week is created as an alternative remedy to look into and deal with all cases which have stalled for one reason or the other. The aim of the exercise apart from decongesting Correctional Centre’s, is to clear backlog of cases which are being created mainly due to the absence of accused person or the absence of witness’s couple with the heavy load of judges due to the high judge to – person population ratio, which significantly improved, is still high.”
The Honorable Chief Justice ended by thanking UNDP for helping the government to support the process and also to see Sierra Leone building and maintaining a strong judiciary system.