Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin, has disagreed expressly with an Accra High Court’s decision to conduct a daily hearing of a case involving James Gyakye Quayson, the Member of Parliament-elect for Assin North.
Bagbin holds that the position of the court was wrong and selective on the the basis that such a rule is not being applied to others except the MP-elect.
The Speaker, himself a trained lawyer, emphasized that the development was a case of rule by law instead of rule of law, which situation he says does not bode well for Ghana's democracy.
“What we are doing is rule by law, not rule of law, and I think that we should move away from that. For democracy to succeed, the pillar is the rule of law.
"I tell them, and I tell the judges, it is not right. If it is done to everybody, I have no problem but if it is done selectively, I have a problem," he stressed during a visit to the state-owned Graphic Communications Group Limited on Thursday, June 29.
“The law is not the centre of democracy, that is one of the errors in our [1992] constitution, read through our constitution and you’ll see the law is a respecter of so many people.
“So many people in Ghana are above the law. You can’t have democracy [with that] and so we need to work at it seriously and this [is why] the constitutional review is something we must take up,” he added.
On the Gyakye Quayson case, even though the trial judge dismissed a motion seeking a reversal of the daily trial order, ordering that it starts next week, lawyers for the accused have escalated the matter by approachig the Court of Appeal.
They want the higher court to stay proceedings in the High Court and make a determination on the daily trial ruling.
On February 12, 2022, the State charged James Gyakye Quayson with five counts; deceit of a public officer, forgery of a passport, knowingly making a false statutory declaration, perjury, and false declaration.
Background:
The High Court in Accra, on Friday (June 16, 2023), ruled that the ongoing criminal trial of ousted Assin North Member of Parliament, James Gyakye Quayson, will be heard daily.
This was after the presiding judge, Justice Mary Maame Ekue Yanzuh, turned down an application for the trial to be adjourned till after the June 27 Assin North by-election, which Quayson was contesting.
His lawyers appealed the ruling but it was dismissed leading to the Court of Appeal route.
Quayson was recently ousted from parliament after the Supreme Court of Ghana ruled that he was ineligible to contest in the 2020 parliamentary election because he failed to renounce his Canadian citizenship in time.
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Alban Bagbin, Speaker of Parliament
