The Sovereignty of Law

The infant African nation of Ghana began life with high hopes that Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and his ruling party would show enough statesmanship to win the cooperation of the minorities in Ashanti and the Northern Territories. But the richer, more highly educated Ashantis, controlling the country's one big cash crop (cocoa), have agitated so articulately for upcountry rights that Nkrumah's less literate supporters, unable to talk them down, have resorted to highhanded repression. By the most arbitrary of these measures the government deported two Ashanti Moslem leaders on the ground that their presence was "not conducive to the public good." When the Moslems sued to claim their citizens' rights in court, Nkrumah & Co. whipped through a bill ordering their expulsion.

In Kumasi last week two wigged British barristers, both of them Queen's Counsels, fought a bitter battle before barelegged, toga-clad blacks to determine the right of the deported Moslems to return to Ghana. For Nkrumah's government, portly Attorney General Geoffrey Bing (TIME, Sept. 30) argued that Ghana's Parliament has "absolute and complete power to legislate on any subject whatever," and no court may review any act not specifically forbidden by the constitution.

For the absent opposition leaders, Lawyer Phineas Quass, a birdlike little man who had arrived from London only the previous week, insisted sharply: "This statute breaks two fundamental rights of a citizen, namely, to live in his own country, and to have access to the courts." For the government, Bing cited Cyprus' Archbishop Makarios, the Kabaka of Buganda and Bechuanaland's Seretse Khama as individuals who had been deported under British parliamentary rule. Retorted Quass: "I know of no precedent for suggesting that [the constitution's] words--'Peace, order and good government'--have been used anywhere to justify a breach of the fundamental rights of people everywhere to reside in the state in which they are citizens."

The dispute in the dusty Ashanti capital touched a crucial Commonwealth question, a question of which Australia's Prime Minister Robert Menzies observed recently: "Perhaps we do not always understand that 'the rule of law' and 'the rule of Parliament' can be separately stated in words but are not easily separated in fact. Self-government is not only a political conception. It is a legal conception. In short, I don't believe there can be any form of parliamentary self-government without a recognition of the rule of law."

At week's end the arguments still went on in Kumasi. The decision that British Justice H. C. Smith must render will go far to decide the meaning of law and liberty in Ghana.

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