…After dragging A-G, BNI to Supreme Court
Posted: The Chronicle | Thursday, November 12, 2009
By Charles Takyi - Boadu
A leading member of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Raymond Kakraba Quarshie who sued the government through its agents; the Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI), has backtracked.
He brought a suit against the two state institutions at the Superior Court seeking an order that any person appearing before any panel of the BNI shall be entitled to a lawyer of his choice. But barely two months after initiating the suit, Kakraba Quarshie, who happens to be a lawyer and a former executive of the NPP failed to pursue the case after the A-G filed her response.
He filed a notice of discontinuation saying that after having carefully studied the legal authorities cited by the AG in her preliminary objections, he has taken the decision to discontinue his action.
Kakraba Quarshie was seeking a declaration that “the decision of the government freezing the constitutional rights of NPP gurus and former government officials to have legal representation when they are invited to national security facilities for interrogation is oppressive, capricious, arbitrary, unconstitutional and a clear violation of Article 14 of the 1992 constitution and other statutes”.
This, according to him, was because the country’s Constitution guaranteed that every person shall be entitled to his personal liberty and no person shall be deprived of his personal liberty except in certain cases and in accordance with procedure permitted by law.
These exceptions, he said included the execution of a sentence or order of a court in respect of a criminal offence, of which a person has been convicted; in execution of an order of a court punishing a person in contempt of court; for the purpose of bringing a person before a court in execution of an order of a court or when a person is suffering from an infectious or contagious disease.
He also identified other exceptions which included preventing unlawful entry of that person into Ghana, or upon reasonable suspicions of his/her having committed or being about to commit a criminal offence under the laws of Ghana. But in her response to the suit, the A-G and Minister of Justice raised legal objections to the effect that the applicant’s suit was in contravention of Article 33 of the constitution which provides that any action seeking to enforce the fundamental human rights of a person must be initiated at the High Court and that it was wrong in law to sue the BNI instead of the Attorney General.
Kakraba Quarshie’s suit was necessitated by the invitation of several members of the previous NPP administration including Ministers to the BNI for questioning. Some of these former Ministers and the party itself protested against the decision of the BNI not to allow the affected Ministers to be accompanied by their lawyers when they were invited by the BNI.