The Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) has urged people who are denied public services or have difficulty accessing such services to file a complaint at CHRAJ for redress.
According to CHRAJ, it had the legal mandate to receive complaints of such nature, investigate and take remedial actions. A Deputy Commissioner of CHRAJ, Mercy Larbi, disclosed this during an exclusive interview with the Daily Graphic.
“If you have applied for a passport, for instance, and the Passport Office is unduly delaying in issuing you with the passport, or you have applied to register your land at Lands Commission and they are unduly delaying in offering you their services, you can file a complaint for us to go into the reasons for the undue delay and give you redress,” she said.
Ms Larbi disclosed that many people were not aware that CHRAJ had the mandate to provide redress for people aggrieved by the service delivery of public institutions. “Although the law allowed members of the public to file complaints of such nature referred to as service delivery to CHRAJ, many were not taking advantage of it, either for fear of being denied the service after reporting or they were not even aware that such avenues were available to them,” she added.
Complaints
The CHRAJ Deputy Commissioner said pursuant to the laws and regulations governing its operations, CHRAJ could only act when people formally made a complaint to it. “Our mandate is complaint-driven. Without complaints, we cannot act, so we need more people to lodge complaints relating to service delivery and administrative justice,” she said.
Explaining the processes of CHRAJ, Ms Larbi said after the receipt of complaints, CHRAJ made an assessment to determine whether that complaint fell within its mandate, and if it did, the complaint was transmitted to the respondent for its response which by law ought to be submitted within 10 days.
Response
After receipt of the response, she said CHRAJ would act on the complaint vis-a-vis the response after which it would come out with directives and recommendations to inform reforms in that particular public institution.
She said CHRAJ services were free and, therefore, people were not required to pay any money even where legal services were required in the settlement of the complaint filed. Mrs Larbi, however, added that the fact that CHRAJ services were free did not mean that it would unduly delay acting on complaints.
“We therefore encourage people who think their human rights have been violated, or public institutions are not treating them right to file a complaint to CHRAJ, she said.
CHRAJ mandate
CHRAJ is an independent constitutional body created by Article 216 of the 1992 Constitution. It serves as the national human rights institution, an anti-corruption agency and the institution that promotes and polices ethics in the public sector.
CHRAJ has the mandate to investigate complaints of human rights violations, injustice, corruption, breaches of the code of conduct for public officers, unfair treatment by public officials, and alleged corruption and misappropriation of funds by public officials
