Communications interception is the sharpest power a state holds over its citizens’ private lives, and in Ghana its legal architecture has accreted rather than been designed. Authority is spread across security and intelligence legislation, electronic communications law, and operator licence conditions, each drafted in a different era for a different network. This paper maps that architecture in full and tests it against the Constitution’s privacy guarantee and the international standards Ghana has undertaken to respect.
The mapping exercise alone yields uncomfortable findings. The statutory bases for interception do not use consistent language about who may authorise surveillance, against what threshold of suspicion, or for how long. Retention obligations imposed on operators are broad, and the subscriber registration regime ties every SIM card to a verified identity, which means metadata held by operators amounts to a fine-grained record of association and movement for nearly every adult in the country. Powers designed for targeted investigation acquire, in combination, the character of infrastructure for observation at scale. That is the unlawful drift of the title: not a single illegal act, but a slow movement of practice beyond what any single enactment contemplated.
The constitutional analysis proceeds on the tests that comparative courts now treat as settled. Interference with privacy must be prescribed by law that is accessible and foreseeable, must pursue a legitimate aim, and must be necessary and proportionate to that aim, with independent authorisation and effective remedy as the procedural spine. Measured against those tests, the paper finds that Ghanaian law relies too heavily on internal and executive authorisation and provides no meaningful notification or complaint mechanism for those wrongly surveilled.
The paper’s recommendations are deliberately legislative in form. A single interception of communications statute should consolidate all authority in one place. Judicial authorisation should be required for content interception in all but genuine emergencies, with post hoc review even then. Aggregate transparency reporting should be mandated annually, and an inspector-general model of oversight should be given access to operational systems rather than summaries. None of these reforms disarms the state. They discipline a power that every democracy has learned, at cost, not to leave undisciplined.