The former commissioner of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Emile Short, has described attempts by the majority in parliament to pass the Right to Information Bill (RTI) a day before its dissolution as a “joke”.
“I really can’t understand why it has taken so long for parliament to pass this bill. The majority had every opportunity to pass this bill, which has been there for over a decade,” Mr. Short said in an interview on Class FM.
“I find it almost as a joke that they should attempt a day before the dissolution of this parliament to say that they are going to pass it. It was bound to fail because you cannot pass such an important bill within two days,” he added.
According to him, the attempts by the majority in parliament to pass the bill before parliament’s dissolution are “just a smoke screen, it wasn’t really a genuine attempt to pass the bill”.
Outgoing president John Mahama has charged the Sixth Parliament of the Fourth Republic to pass the Right to Information Bill before its dissolution on Friday, January 6, 2017.
Delivering his last State of the Nation address Thursday, he said the public and civil society organisations are disappointed in “our inability to pass the Right to Information bill.”
He, however, noted that they are still hopeful that before “this parliament is dissolved at midnight on the sixth of January a consensus can be found to pass this bill into law.”
