The Member of Parliament for Ningo Prampram, Sam Nartey George, has explained that one of the things that has slowed the process of passage of the Private Members Bill aimed at making LGBTQ+ activities in Ghana illegal has been acts of filibustering from pro-gay groups.
He explained that through that process, these groups were able to bombard parliament with an overwhelming number of petitions, intended to slow the process and buy them some time.
However, he said that knowing that this was going to happen, and for them to convincingly win this battle, he urged the House to go through the pain of individually reviewing each of them.
Speaking on GhanaWeb TV’s newest program, Legal Agenda, with host Matilda Boateng Nartey, the outspoken legislator, who is also leading this Private Members Bill in Parliament, said that what is interesting is that the contents of most of the petitions were the same.
“This is the first time a full legislation is coming as a private members bill, so it’s still a novel practice parliament is going through. And because of how sensitive this matter is, and because the LGBTQ community decided to do what we call filibustering… so this bill received over 180 petitions.
“When I saw what the clerks were doing; look, some of the petitions, you’ll see the name and address from France, you’ll see the whole petition, about 100 and something pages. Then there’s another petition from Australia and when you take the petition, the only difference in the two petitions is the address – same content, same text, but you see, I said to the committee let’s take our time because we know they’ll go to court and try to say that we didn’t go through the processes, or we fast-tracked the processes, or we jumped a certain process,” he stated.
Sam Nartey George also stated that he insisted that all the petitions be looked at, and with time – a period of over a year and a half - they have successfully done that, paving the way for the bill to be processed.
He told Matilda Boateng Nartey, host of Legal Agenda on GhanaWeb TV, that at the moment, the bill is 80% done.
“We’ll take out time and review every single one of the over 180 memos that came and we took our time and that took almost over a year and half to do and so, where we’ve gotten to, I’d say we have done about 80% of the bill,” he explained.
The anti-gay bill, known as the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, is being spearheaded by 8 Members of Parliament from both sides of the House.
