04/02/2026
The Constitutional Review Committee has completed its work and submitted its recommendations to the President. Legal scholars and disability rights advocates have shown keen interest in understanding how the Committee addressed issues affecting persons with disabilities, who constitute about 8% of Ghana’s population according to the 2021 Population and Housing Census.
DRAC-GH observes that the Committee was careful in drafting its recommendations, ensuring that no specific disability group was favoured at the expense of others. This approach may explain why the Committee declined to adopt proposals submitted by Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) and instead made broader, general recommendations aimed at strengthening legal protections for all persons with disabilities.
One key recommendation from the Committee, chaired by Professor Prempeh, concerns amending Article 29(6) of the 1992 Constitution. The Committee noted that Article 29(6) contains qualifying language that weakens its enforceability. In the view of DRAC-GH, such qualifiers act as barriers that prevent persons with disabilities from effectively using the justice system to enforce their rights. Specifically, the phrase “as far as practicable” makes accessibility obligations optional rather than mandatory, thereby failing to impose a clear and enforceable constitutional duty on the State to ensure accessibility in all public spaces.
For deaf students at both public and private universities, the implications of Article 29(6) in its current form are significant. Universities are only expected to make efforts to provide accessibility measures, such as sign language interpreters and note-takers, when they are able to do so. There is no strict obligation requiring them to provide these supports.
It appears that the framers of the 1992 Constitution treated accessibility as a positive right, which is often considered to be dependent on available resources, rather than as a negative right, which generally requires immediate compliance regardless of resources.
Courts have relied on this distinction to limit disability rights. For example, in Nicky Sentges v. Netherlands, European courts relied on resource constraints to deny access to public facilities, granting States a wide margin of discretion. Similarly, in Africa, Chief Justice Chaskalson, in Soobramoney v. Minister of Health (KwaZulu-Natal), held that even seemingly strong obligations could not be enforced where resources were inadequate. One may ask whether that conclusion would have been different if the case had involved COVID-19 vaccination rather than access to life-saving ART drugs.
DRAC-GH is therefore encouraged that this constitutional weakness did not escape the attention of the Constitutional Review Committee. It is our sincere hope that the government and the people of Ghana will accept and implement this recommendation, as it represents an important step toward strengthening the enforceability of disability rights and ensuring real accessibility for all persons with disabilities.
