Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare, a Fellow in Public Law and Justice at CDD-Ghana and a KPMG Professor in accounting at the Fisher School of Accounting, has stated that there is a lot of procedural confusion in the 5-2 Supreme Court ruling injuncting the Assin North Member of Parliament from performing his Parliamentary duties.

He said, the Cape Coast High Court had no basis for granting the earlier injunction which has been enforced by the Supreme Court.

Kwaku Azar, as known popularly explained that in granting the injunction, the High Court had sought to interpret Article 94(2)(a), an action which is the reserve of the Supreme Court, and had further added timelines to the Article.

He argued that the apex court assenting to the injunction only served as a stamp of approval to the judicial error which now has left the Assin North people unrepresented in Parliament and there is no solution to the lacuna created as a result of the injunction in Parliament.

“There is this injunction because the Plaintiff has issued a writ at the Supreme Court asking for the interpretation of Article 94(2)(a). The Plaintiff is saying he doesn’t understand Article 94(2)(a) and so the Supreme Court should help him understand that.

“But there is a judge somewhere in Cape Coast who has interpreted Article 94(2)(a) and told the Plaintiff ‘hey Plaintiff, I’m going to grant you all your reliefs.’ And the Supreme Court is sitting there saying ‘well yes, we don’t understand Article 94(2)(a) but we’re going to interpret it.

“But meanwhile we think it is okay for some High Court judge not only to interpret it but to issue and grant injunctions setting aside the wishes of voters’, when there is a law that voters decisions must be entreated with the highest level of deference and they are not to be set aside willingly,” Kwaku Azar said on JoyNews’ PM Express on Wednesday, April 13.

Justifying his earlier claim that the High Court in Cape Coast erred, he noted, “in fact, to cancel an election in our jurisdiction, one must show that at the time of the election, not at the time of the primary, not at the time of the nomination, not anytime, at the time of the election, the person was not qualified."

Azar continued: “So regardless of what the Supreme Court will tell us one week or whenever they want to tell us, there’s just no ground for the High Court judge to have determined that one, he’s going to interpret Article 94(2)(a), two, he’s going to put his own timelines in Article 94(2)(a), three, he’s going to injunct the MP.

“And remember he even injuncted the MP on 6th January, he didn’t want the MP to sit in Parliament even before Parliament convened, even before hearing the matter.”

Prof. Stephen Kwaku Asare explained further “now, here’s one thing that people should take into account, at the trial court, the High Court in Cape Coast, there was really no trial. There was no trial. The High Court simply took the arguments of the two parties, went to Wikipedia and copied some phrases from Wikipedia and based on that, ruled that the MP owed allegiance to Canada.

“And what the High Court judge is doing is retroactively saying that this clause that was there for whatever reason he’s going to apply it to a person who the citizenship of another country except in this case the MP had subjectively renounced the citizenship of Canada,” he added.

Background

A High Court in Cape Coast on July, 2021, nullified the election of the Assin North MP, after it found he owed allegiance to Canada at the time of filing his nomination forms to contest the polls.

Michael Ankomah Nimfah, a resident of the constituency, filed the petition in court and later initiated another action at the Supreme Court to enforce the High Court's decision.

He urged the Court to prevent a further breach of the constitution by restraining the MP.

On Wednesday, April 13, the Supreme Court in a 5-2 decision ruled on the issue by barring the Assin North MP from performing any Parliamentary duty.

This is until the determination of the substantive case filed against him at the Supreme Court.

Source: Ghanaweb