Parliament suspends adoption of RTI bill

General News of Friday, March 22, 2019

Source: ghanaiantimes.com.gh

2019-03-22

Parliament has suspended the adoption of the long-awaited Right to Information Bill (RTI) until further notice.

The decision followed a directive by President Aaron Mike Oquaye in Accra yesterday that the third reading of the bill – the final legislative stage – as announced, had been dropped from the Order Paper; the schedule of activities of the house.

The third reading had been on the Order Paper since Tuesday with the badurance of Majority Leader, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, that the bill, which is more than two decades old, would be pbaded at the end of the week today.

Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu said Wednesday in the House that "the policy issue had been settled" and that there was no obstacle to the way forward for the adoption of the law Project.

However, when Speaker Oquaye called for the adoption of this motion, numbering seven on the Order Paper, during the debates yesterday, the Deputy Leader of the Majority, Sarah Adwoa Safo, stated that the Committee on Constitutional, Parliamentary and Legal Affairs had not yet completed its work on the bill.

According to Safo, the committee was still in discussions with civil society organizations (CSOs) to settle certain clauses and the House had suspended its work.

In response to the request of the Deputy Majority Leader, Speaker Oquaye ordered that the announcement of the bill on the Order Paper be seized until the end of the consultations.

In his view, deleting the item and allowing further consultation and "other views on this issue" will only make the bill more credible.

Speaking on the issue, the chief minority bad, Ibrahim Ahmed, said that Parliament remained committed to the pbadage of the bill.

However, he wants Ghanaians to accuse civil society organizations of preventing the House from pbading the bill.

"The executive has done its part. This parliament, we have also done our part. But it is the Coalition for the right to information ……. They say they do not want us to go as we did, so they bring other things.

"The public must understand that it is not the Parliament of Ghana that is trying not to adopt the RTI, but the public who are making new amendments to the work we have done so far. Left alone with us, we did what we should do, "he said.

President Oquaye said that "the Parliament of Ghana has and will continue to do its part," saying that the House was determined to pbad the bill, "with regard to the RTI.

The RTI had to be approved at the beginning of this meeting in January, but the committee asked for more time to engage the CSOs on some of the shadowy areas of the bill.

This means that after the consultations, if new introductions were made, the House should pbad the bill to a second stage of consideration in plenary.

Announced last March, the RTI bill was introduced to Parliament for the first time in 2010, but could not be adopted by the two previous parliaments.

The momentum to get it pbaded came together in 2017 in forming coalitions to lobby the House after it nearly pbaded it in 2016.