Indemnity clause likely to be maintained -Dr Atuguba

Executive Secretary of the Constitution Review Commission, Dr Raymond Atuguba, Wednesday on Awake pointed some sections of the constitution which are likely to be amended or retained.

Although the President is the sole person who is allowed to make public the recommendations made in the constitution, Dr Atuguba also held some personal views regarding some clauses and articles in the constitution.

Whilst some have called unnecessary the need to tamper with the constitution, Dr Atuguba, however thought otherwise.

According to him, the constitution as a framework has gotten to its limit in so many areas.

He cited media freedom as one of the provisions of the constitutions which was likely to regress the country.

He explained that some democratic societies had scaled back because their constitutions had reached their limits, thus the need for a constitutional review.

In his judgment of Ghana, he said, “we’ve gotten to our utmost limit of the parameters of good governance that have been set by our constitution. Unless you break that limit and increase the purview, we are going to start regressing. In some areas already, we’ve started regressing.

“We’ve started regressing because we are now calling for the scaling back of media freedom because we haven’t been able to break the parameters of the constitution in order to better regulate the media and so people are saying look let’s shut down this radio station, let’s deal with this journalist, let’s bring back the criminal libel law.

“It means our constitution as a framework has gotten to its limit in allowing media freedom. What we need to do is to break the bounds of the constitution and extend it. Otherwise, we will start regressing. We are actually at a very dangerous point.”

Dr Atuguba also explained further that although the constitution creates the National Media Commission as a “boss” in the management of the media, it had also created some ambiguities which allow the NMC to have a lot of power in regulating the media.

“Unless we break that, we are going to have a lot of people having problems with the media. Not because the media is currently being problematic, but because the constitutional space and institutional structures in which the media thrives are not properly created,” he explained.

Issues such as the indemnity clause also crossed the table during his studio discussion with host, Rashida Nassamu.

Dr Atuguba said, the commission received “overwhelming” views that the indemnity clause be retained in the constitution.

In his opinion, he sided with those who called for it to be retained, saying that “The most convincing argument for me is that we had a national reconciliation process set up by the national reconciliation act by parliament to address issues relating to the indemnity clause and the harm it had caused to Ghanaians.

“So, to remove them now would be to say that the entire process of the national reconciliation commission is in doubt. To say that remove the indemnity clause means that the national reconciliation process and healing which has been used in other jurisdictions like South Africa was useless. For me it was a powerful argument.”

Dr Atuguba’s take on provisions made in the constitution with regards to parliament not having supreme powers differed.

He explained that one of the reasons that the review committee was constituted was because parliament was too weak, thus the need to strengthen it.

He explained that Article 108 was problematic because it states that Members of Parliament did not have the prerogative to forward initiatives which have financial implications.

“People and even ex-speakers of parliament have said that every law has financial implications because when you print the law on paper that is money. So effectively, it means parliament in itself, by itself cannot pass a law,” he explained.

The Constitution Review Commission was constituted by President John Evans Atta Mills in January 2010 to undertake a consultative review of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution.

The Commission has since presented a 15 chapter report to the President and has suggested measures that the Government might wish to take to translate its recommendations into constitutional, legislative and administrative actions that would improve national governance and the people’s lives.

However, the recommendations have not been made public since the President holds the sole prerogative to do so.

Dr Atuguba was hopeful that in the next two weeks the recommendations would be made public.

Jasmine Arku / etvghana.com