Vehicles do not commit crimes: Registered-Owner liability, the presumption of innocence, and the legality of TRAFFITECH-GH

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The scheme's practical mechanism treats the owner as liable unless he identifies another person as the driver. Whatever its administrative convenience, this places on the accused the burden of disproving an element of the offence. It is in substance a legal, not merely evidential, reverse onus. It also sits in tension with Article 19(10), which protects a person tried for a criminal offence from being compelled to give evidence at the trial. An owner cannot be required, on pain of penalty, to construct the prosecution's case against himself or against a member of his household or workforce without any express legislative requirement.

It may be said that no one is convicted, since the recipient may simply pay, and that the option of contesting in court preserves every procedural right. The answer is that payment under the pressure of a compounding daily surcharge and the withdrawal of DVLA services is not a free admission of guilt. And the motorist who elects to contest is entitled to insist that the State prove its case in the ordinary way, without the benefit of a presumption that Parliament has not enacted.

VI. Constitutional and Administrative-Law Infirmities

To the extent that TRAFFITECH-GH operates on a presumption that the registered owner is the offender, it depends on a reversal of the onus of proof that Parliament has not enacted. Four consequences follow.

Article 1(2) renders void any law, and any act, inconsistent with the Constitution. The presumption of innocence in Article 19(2)(c) and the guarantee of a fair hearing in Article 19(1) bind the Police Service and the DVLA no less than the courts. An administrative practice that infers guilt from title cannot be sustained against them.

L.I. 2519 derives its validity entirely from Act 683. Subsidiary legislation is valid only within the four corners of the enabling power; what the parent Act does not authorise, the instrument cannot do. The Road Traffic (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Act 1153) brought automated fines within the definition of a spot fine. It is silent on owner liability for another's driving, silent on any presumption that the owner was the driver, and silent on the burden of proof. A general power to regulate road traffic is not, on any ordinary reading, an authority to create vicarious criminal liability or to displace presumption of innocence.

It must also be noted that Act 1153 did not amend section 118 of the Road Traffic Act, 2004 (Act 683), which requires that spot fines, which were later defined to include an automated fine payable upon the commission of a traffic offence, were only to be imposed on the person who commits an offence. Section 133(1) of Act 683 only enabled the Minister to make regulations "providing for the payment of spot fines and offences for which spot fines are payable". The parent Act clearly does not envisage the imposition of a spot fine on another merely because he is the registered owner of the vehicle involved in the commission of the offence and a fortiori for the person to prove that he was not in operation of the vehicle at the time of the offence or to identify or produce the offender to exculpate himself. A legislative instrument made thereunder that provides for the transfer of criminal liability on a person other than the person who committed the offence is clearly inconsistent with the Parent Act and therefore unlawful. The parent act clearly required that the police identify the offender and impose the spot fine on him; an attempt by a legislative instrument to transfer the liability or a shift of the criminal burden on another, other than the police, to identify the offender is clearly in conflict with, or amounts to an amendment of, the parent Act.

This was the exact act prohibited in the case of Mensima and others v Attorney-General and others. In that case, reg 3(1) and 21 of the Manufacture and Sale of Spirits Regulations, 1962 (L.I 239) required as a condition to the grant of a distiller's licence that an applicant was to be a member of a registered co-operative and also requiring that a distilled gin be sold to specific persons. The Plaintiffs challenged the regulations on grounds, among others, that it was inconsistent with the parent act as it provided no such requirement for registration. The Supreme Court, per a majority decision, held that The Manufacture and Sale of Spirits Act, 1962 (Act 154), subsequently repealed by the Liquor Licensing Act, 1970 (Act 331), under which LI 239 was made did not specifically provide for the making of regulations for the issuing of distiller's licence conditioned on one being a member of a co­operative society. LI 239 had thus clearly amended its enabling or parent Act. And since Act 331 did not provide that the regulations made under it should have the same effect as if enacted in the Act, regulation 3(1) of LI 239 was in conflict with Act 331. The Court accordingly struck it.

It is my contention that, under the principle of legality, fundamental rights may be overridden only by express words or necessary implication, so that the legislature must squarely confront what it is doing and accept the political cost. [23] General words in a regulation-making power do not meet that standard.

The strongest textual answer available to the State is Article 19(16)(a), which saves from invalidity a law that imposes on a person charged with a criminal offence the burden of proving particular facts. Three points may be made in reply. First, as an exception to a fundamental right, the provision must be construed narrowly. It contemplates the proof of particular facts, characteristically facts peculiarly within the accused's knowledge such as the possession of a licence or lawful excuse, and not a presumption as to the identity of the offender, which is the very core of guilt. Second, comparative jurisprudence counsels caution. The House of Lords in R v Lambert read down a statutory reverse burden to an evidential one in order to preserve the presumption of innocence; the Constitutional Court of South Africa in S v Coetzee struck down reverse-onus presumptions that permitted conviction despite reasonable doubt; and the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Oakes held that a provision requiring an accused to disprove an element of the offence infringed the presumption of innocence.

Third, while I do not intend by this paper to postulate that an onus reversal offence is prima facie unconstitutional under our law, it is my contention that where the law maker intended to create an onus reversal offence, same is clearly stated in the law. This principle was espoused in the case of Donkor v The Republic where Wiredu J (as he then was) held as follows, "Where a statute creates an offence, it is the duty of the prosecution to prove each and every element of the offence which is a sine qua non to securing conviction. Unless the same statute places a particular burden on the accused, the fundamental and cardinal principle as to the criminal burden of proof on the prosecution should not be shifted even slightly." Again, even if Article 19(16)(a) could in principle sustain an owner-liability presumption, a derogation of that gravity ought to be enacted by parliament in an Act, after open debate, and not inferred from a ministerial instrument read together with press statements.

The refusal of licence renewal, vehicle registration and roadworthiness certification, together with a compounding daily surcharge, are penalties. They are imposed before any court has found the recipient guilty, based on a notice sent to a telephone number that may be years out of date. Contests are lodged with, and resolved by, the department that issued the notice. This process is difficult to reconcile with the fair-hearing guarantee in Article 19(1) and the duty of administrative bodies and officials under Article 23 to act fairly and reasonably.

A serious argument must meet the best case against it. Five objections merit consideration.