Associate Professor Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atuah of the University of Ghana School of Law, has stated that even though justice delayed is justice denied, justice hurried is also justice buried, in reference to the daily trial of the Assin North Member of Parliament; James Gyakye Quayson.
Prof. Appiagyei-Atuah averred that the legislator’s ability to perform his parliamentary duties is being hampered by the daily trial.
According to him, this calls into doubt the trial’s fairness. His remarks follow Alfred Tuah-Yeboah, the deputy Attorney General, who indicated that Gyakye Quayson’s trial is not being rushed by the prosecution or the judge.
According to Tuah-Yebuah, the trial judge has discretion over how this matter should be handled. He asserted that he did not perceive any urgency in this particular subject and that because it is before a court of law, each judge is free to decide how to proceed.
“In this particular case, the judge made an order that she is going to hear the matter today. In the subsequent proceedings, she made it clear that even if it is daily, it doesn’t mean that every day he should be in court. There may times where the court may not even sit, there may times where the counsel for either the accused or the state may be absent or the accused himself may be out. For example, on the very day that he was sworn in, because of that the court could not go on.
“We were in court and the matter has been adjourned to next week Wednesday. So this noise about day-to-day hearing and making comments as if the judge is trying to hound the accused person, is something that I cannot understand. If you go to the other courts in Accra, in some of the courts, they go to court three times or sometimes four times a week. And so, I do see any difference between those accused persons and this accused person.”
Deputy AG Alfred Tuah-Yeboah
On the same program, Prof. Appiagyei-Atuah responded to him by claiming that the daily trial is “certainly going to affect him and so on that basis, fairness is not in there.”
Withhold Salary Of MPs Who Boycott To Support Gyakye Quayson
According to renowned economist, Kwame Pianim, MPs should not receive their allowances if they refuse to do their legislative duties in order to criticize circumstances they find favorable.
He claimed that a legislator has no business abstaining from parliament.
“A parliamentarian has no business to boycott parliament. If they boycott parliament, their allowances should be taken off. Parliament is young, there is a tendency now to put a lot of burden on the fledgling judiciary which is not fair.
“Political parties and the EC should make sure that elections are won at the ballot box and not in the court. If you put politics in front of the courts, you are weakening them and you are making them become partisan. Let them be free because once we lose the independence of the judiciary, there is no justice in this country.”
Kwame Pianim
He was responding to the Minority’s decision to boycott Parliamentary sessions in order to voice their opposition to Assin North MP, James Gyakye Quayson’s trial.
The Minority declared that they had made the decision to respond in kind to the government’s intensification of what they refer to as Mr. Quayson’s “persecution.”
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