Programmes Supervisor for the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), Mary Awelana Addah, says it’s pointless for presidency to move new legal guidelines to combat corruption within the nation when present ones should not being applied.
Based on her, the federal government and legislation enforcement businesses should strengthen present legal guidelines which have requisite provisions pertaining to how corruption-related issues ought to be handled.
Chatting with Samson Lardi Anyenini on Newsfile on Saturday, she pressured that it’s insufficient for a authorities to tout that extra legal guidelines have been handed when in precise phrases, such guidelines find yourself turning into dysfunctional.
“I consider that at this level [and] I think you’d agree with me that we don’t want extra legal guidelines. What we want is to strengthen what we have already got,” she mentioned.
Delivering the keynote tackle on the Nationwide Anti-Corruption Convention on December 10, President Akufo-Addo mentioned his authorities has undertaken, arguably, the boldest initiatives since independence to reform and strengthen the capability of the nation’s establishments to sort out corruption within the public sector.
Based on him, “authorities has fought corruption not in phrases, however in concrete deeds. We’ve shunned mere exhortations and showy denunciations of unproved corruption. It has been a holistic method.”
The President cited legal guidelines such because the Witness Safety Act, 2018, (Act 975) and the Legal Offences (Modification) Act, 2020, (Act 1034) which was handed to amend part 239 of the Legal Offences Act, to classify the offence of corruption, beforehand a misdemeanor, as a felony, and to ensure stiffer punishments of phrases of imprisonment of not lower than twelve (12) years and no more than twenty-five (25) years in jail.
However Mary Addah believes the Legal and Different Offences (Process) Act was sufficient to cope with a number of the points the President talked about in his speech.
She thinks the try to exchange present legal guidelines with new ones are unnecessary.
“Let me shortly say that when he talks in regards to the modification of the Legal Offences Act to make corruption a second-degree felony, we already had a legislation – the Legal Offences and Process Act – which already indicated that anyone who was discovered culpable of a corrupt act might go to jail for 25 years.”
“Typically, we simply need to go to Parliament simply to make the method firmer, however we already had a legislation which we might operationalise, and for me, I assumed it wasn’t one of many vital issues we would have liked to do as a result of we already had a legislation to cowl that,” she argued.
“Once more, with the Witness Safety Act that we handed, we’ve got whistleblower laws that we’re working with, which isn’t too efficient as we converse. Within the whistleblower laws, we’ve got a compensation mechanism which has by no means been activated; these are a number of the issues we ought to be pursuing.”
In the meantime, she needs the Lawyer Normal to operationalise a number of the legal guidelines below his mandate and make sure that the required funds for his or her implementation are arrange.
“In the event you go to the establishments which can be alleged to be receiving complaints and dealing on them, they’ll let you know that on an annual foundation, we don’t even 10 complaints, not to mention to speak about pursuing this.”
“It’s about actualising the legislation and making certain that it operates and if we don’t put in place the mechanism and structure, to make sure that these legal guidelines are working, then we’d be capturing ourselves within the foot,” she added.
