INTRODUCTION

In sharp contrast to The Gambia, Ghana has long observed a moratorium on the death penalty and has expressed a commitment in principle to abolition in both domestic and international fora. Ghana routinely abstains on the periodic UN General Assembly resolutions calling for a global moratorium, and the government of current President John Dramani Mahama has preserved his predecessor's White Paper proposing a constitutional amendment abolishing capital punishment. The Ghanaian electorate is likely to go to the polls to vote on a series of constitutional amendments during 2016. However, not all is progress: the Ghana Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the mandatory death penalty in a confusing and legally unsound opinion, though a subsequent petition to the UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) resulted in a finding that Ghana's mandatory capital punishment regime was out of compliance with Ghana's ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Ghana remains in the familiar moratorium limbo, though it is likely the retentionist country closest to abolition in Commonwealth Africa.

Ghana, the former British colony of Gold Coast and previously the site of an important slaving post, is a small country in West Africa bordered by Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, and Burkina Faso with a population of about 25 million people. Members of the Akan ethnic group comprise about half the population, though the Akan community is divided into a number of smaller subgroups. One of these subgroups is the Ashanti, who possessed a powerful state in the early nineteenth century that resisted British rule. In postcolonial times Ashanti has become a stronghold of conservatism while other Akan groups formed alliances with the Ga and the Ewe and other minority ethnicities to balance Ashanti power. These alliances were on display even in the 2012 general election, in which the Ashanti region voted heavily for the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the party of former President John Kufour, while the northern, coastal, and eastern regions supported the ultimately-victorious National Democratic Congress (NDC), the party of former Presidents Jerry Rawlings and John Atta Mills and current president Mahama.