This thesis explores the multiple transitions in Ghana’s history beginning with postwar decolonization struggles of the late 1940s through the attainment of independence in 1957 and the subsequent ruptures and truncations of elected governments by military juntas, ending with a return to liberal democracy in 1992. It identifies the period under review as a turbulent one marked by degrees of change caused in part by violent military takeovers and repressive civilian rule, resulting in gross human rights violations. In the early 2000, Ghana’s newly elected president, J. A. Kufuor with his New Patriotic Party (NPP) government established a truth commission called the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) to offer a space for victims, survivors and perpetrators of past human rights violations to openly testify in return for appropriate redress, with a view towards facilitating a national reconciliation. For months the floor of the commission’s hearings became a contested site for the negotiations of various interests, claims and demands by a wide range of actors. This thesis has argued that the commission’s floor became an emporium of claim-making by actors of various sorts contesting and challenging shared histories and enacting a return to rights-assertion as a function of democratic accountability. However, these exercises were being built upon a long historical tradition of rights assertions by ordinary persons who perceived themselves as “rights-bearing citizens of an imagined community” as illustrated by selected instances from precolonial times, colonial era protest politics, self-determination and decolonization discourses, economic protests, postcolonial political ruptures and transitions, human rights activisms, and debates over political accountability. This study establishes continuities between incipient avowals by military regimes to pursue reconciliation, reparations, the uses of commissions of enquiry, and the instances of legal reversals as foreshadowing what became a full-blown transitional justice programme in the 2000s In short, this thesis is about how the language of rights has been deployed across the country’s postcolonial political transitions in Ghana. But it also illustrates the roles that rights have played in shaping legislations and transitions, constitution-making, constitutional protections as well as laying the foundation for the country’s attempted reconciliation and democracy.