By: Albert Gyamfi, Esq.
Abstract
On 1st November, 2026, the Ghana Police Service commenced full implementation of TRAFFITECH-GH, an automated traffic enforcement programme under which Electronic Notices of Violation are issued to registered vehicle owners detected committing road traffic offences. This article contends that the programme, as presently operated, rests on an unexamined assumption: that the person in whose name a vehicle is registered is the person who committed the offence. It argues, first, that criminal liability in Ghana attaches to persons by reason of their own conduct and not to vehicles or to the holders of title in them; second, that Ghanaian law recognises no general doctrine of vicarious criminal liability capable of fixing a registered owner with the offences of employees, agents, borrowers or unregistered transferees; third, that the identity of the driver is an element of the offence which the prosecution must establish beyond reasonable doubt; and fourth, that an enforcement regime which in substance presumes the owner’s guilt, absent a clear Act of Parliament reversing the onus of proof, is ultra vires its parent statute and inconsistent with Article 19 of the 1992 Constitution. The article closes by considering the principal objections and proposing a lawful legislative framework.
Keywords: automated traffic enforcement; vicarious liability; presumption of innocence; reverse onus; subsidiary legislation; Article 19, 1992 Constitution of Ghana
I. Introduction
A camera can record a number plate. It cannot record a guilty mind, nor, in most deployments, the identity of the person at the wheel. This limitation, trivial as a matter of engineering, is fundamental as a matter of criminal law, and it lies at the centre of the legal difficulty presented by TRAFFITECH-GH.
The programme went live nationwide on 1st November, 2026, after a one-month postponement announced to allow further public sensitisation. Its objective is beyond reproach. Ghana’s road fatality figures are grave, and technology that deters speeding and the disregard of traffic signals is a legitimate instrument of public policy. The question this article addresses is narrower and juridical: whether the State may lawfully treat the registered owner of a vehicle as the offender and require that owner to exculpate himself, without an enabling Act of Parliament that clearly provides for it.
The argument proceeds in seven further Parts. Part II describes the scheme and its legal architecture. Part III restates the principle that criminal liability is founded on personal conduct. Part IV demonstrates the absence of any general doctrine of vicarious criminal liability in Ghanaian law. Part V examines the allocation of the burden of proof. Part VI identifies the constitutional and administrative-law infirmities that follow. Part VII engages the strongest objections, drawing on comparative practice. Part VIII proposes a lawful framework, and Part IX concludes.
II. The TRAFFITECH-GH Scheme and Its Legal Architecture
- Operation
Fixed, vehicle-mounted, tripod and handheld devices capture alleged violations. Following review at a back office, an Electronic Notice of Violation (ENV) is transmitted by SMS to the registered owner at the telephone number held on the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) record. The recipient may, within 14 days, pay the fine electronically or lodge an online contest; the matter proceeds to court only if contested. Default attracts a surcharge of one per cent of the fine for each day, and, until payment, the DVLA will decline to renew a driving licence, register or transfer a vehicle, or conduct a roadworthiness inspection. Regulation 242 of the Road Traffic Regulations, 2026 (L.I. 2519) prescribes the fines: ten penalty units for each of the first three offences, rising thereafter, with a sixth offence within 24 months referred to court.
B, The Locus of Liability
Official and semi-official guidance on liability has not been consistent. Public explainers issued before the rollout stated that the registered owner bears liability irrespective of who was driving; that a seller who has not registered a change of ownership remains responsible; that a company is answerable for its employees’ use of its vehicles; and that an owner may rely on theft only where it was reported to the police before the alleged offence. The Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) subsequently characterised the owner’s liability as initial, explaining that the owner may thereafter identify the driver, and that the relevant regulation defines the responsible person as the owner or the person driving at the material time.
C. Statutory Foundation
The primary legislation is strikingly sparse. The Road Traffic (Amendment) Act, 2005 (Act 1153) addresses automated enforcement only by extending the definition of “spot fine” to include an automated fine. Owner liability, the daily surcharge, licence consequences and the evidential status of camera records are left to L.I. 2519. That instrument is subsidiary legislation made by the Minister under the regulation-making power conferred by the Road Traffic Act, 2004 (Act 683). The structural significance of this allocation, between Act and instrument, is developed in Part VI.
Ill. Personal Conduct as the Foundation of Criminal Liability
The first proposition is elementary but frequently obscured in public debate: vehicles do not commit offences; persons do. A motor vehicle possesses neither will nor knowledge and cannot be the subject of a criminal prohibition. Offences such as exceeding a speed limit, disregarding a traffic signal or using a mobile telephone while driving are offences of conduct, and the relevant conduct is the act of driving. The offender is the person in control of the vehicle at the moment of the prohibited act.
This proposition has constitutional footing. Article 19(11) of the 1992 Constitution forbids conviction for a criminal offence unless the offence is defined, and its penalty prescribed, in a written law. Road traffic offences are defined by reference to what a person does. Evidence that a vehicle bearing a given registration mark travelled above the limit establishes the actus reus in the abstract; it says nothing about whose act it was. Both elements; the offending act and the offender, must be proved to establish criminal liability.
Registration does not bridge that gap. The DVLA register is an administrative record of title and of the person responsible for licensing a vehicle. It was never designed to record, and does not purport to record, who drives a vehicle on any given occasion, neither does it contain a restriction that a registered vehicle must be driven by the registered owner at all times. In the Ghanaian context the divergence between owner and driver is endemic rather than exceptional: commercial vehicles are owned by one person and driven by several in rotation; private vehicles are shared within households; and vehicles change hands informally, often more than once, without registration of the transfer. To treat registration as proof of driving is to convict on a document incapable of proving the fact issue.
IV. The Absence of Vicarious Criminal Liability in Ghanaian Law
A. The General Principle
Criminal responsibility is personal. A person is liable for what he does, and for what he counsels, aids, abets or procures; he is not liable in the criminal courts for another’s act merely by reason of a relationship with that other. The contrast with tort law is instructive. An employer is vicariously liable in damages for torts committed by an employee in the course of employment, and a vehicle owner may be joined as a defendant in civil proceedings arising from a collision. These rules allocate the burden of compensation. They have never been rules allocating guilt.
At common law, which Ghanaian courts treat as highly persuasive, vicarious criminal liability is exceptional. It arises only where a statute, expressly or by necessary implication, imposes liability on one person for the acts of another, as the House of Lords emphasised in Vane v Yiannopoullos. Even the classic instances of statutory vicarious liability, such as those recognised in Mousell Bros Ltd v London and North-Western Railway Co, depend on the construction of particular statutory language. No Ghanaian Act of Parliament renders a registered owner criminally liable for speeding or signal offences committed by another person.
B. Employees andCommercialDrivess
The owner of a commercial vehicle whose driver exceeds the limit has committed no offence. He did not drive, did not authorise the excess, and may have prohibited it. A corporate owner stands in no different position: although a company is a legal person capable of criminal liability for its own acts, the company does not drive; the driver does. To fine the company for the driver’s conduct is vicarious liability in its purest form.
C. Agents, Relatives and Borrowers
Lending a vehicle is lawful. A parent who lends a car to an adult child, or an owner whose vehicle is road-tested by a mechanic, does not thereby become a party to offences later committed by the user. Absent proof of participation, such as encouragement or knowing permission to commit the specific offence, the general principles of secondary liability provide no basis for attributing the user’s conduct to the owner.
D. Unregistered Transferees
L.I. 2519 requires notice of a change of ownership within 14 days. A transferor who fails to give that notice may be answerable for that default, a discrete regulatory breach carrying its own consequence. It does not follow that he becomes criminally responsible for every offence the transferee commits thereafter. A failure to update a register cannot be transmuted into participation in another person’s subsequent crime.
E. The Disjunctive Definition
On the MTTD’s own account, the regulation defines the responsible person as the owner or the driver at the time of the offence. That formulation is disjunctive. It identifies the classes of person who may be charged, depending on the facts proved; it does not provide that the owner is guilty when the driver offends, and it does not deem the owner to have been the driver. Had the legislature intended to fix owners with criminal responsibility for the conduct of others, it was required to say so in unmistakable terms. It has not done so.
V. The Burden of Proof and the Presumption of Innocence
A. The Governing Rules
Article 19(2)(c) of the Constitution provides that a person charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved or pleaded guilty. The Evidence Act, 1975 (NRCD 323) gives that guarantee procedural content: in a criminal action the prosecution bears the burden of producing evidence, and the burden of persuasion, as to every fact essential to guilt, and must discharge the latter beyond reasonable doubt. Section 22 of the Act is especially significant. Where a presumption operates against an accused person as to a fact essential to guilt, the accused need only raise a reasonable doubt as to the presumed fact. The principle, traceable to Woolmington v Director of Public Prosecutions, has been consistently affirmed by the Supreme Court of Ghana, which has held that the burden of proving guilt remains with the prosecution throughout and never shifts to the accused to establish innocence.
B. Identity of the Driver as an Essential Element
The identity of the driver is a fact essential to guilt; without it there is no offender. The prosecution must therefore prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that the person named in the ENV was the person driving. A photograph of a registration mark, together with an extract from the DVLA register, establishes ownership. It does not establish driving. To infer the latter from the former is to supply by assumption the very element the law requires the State to prove.
C. Nomination as a Reversal of the Onus