The executive director of the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) Professor Henry Kwasi Prempeh has said that the leader of the #Fixthecountry movement, Mawuse Oliver Barker-Vormawor is being treated as a political prisoner.
According to him, the handling of Barker-Vormawor is an abuse of the judicial process, stating that although a coup is illegal, it does not forbid individuals from talking about it.
Speaking to Beatrice Adu on The Big Bulletin on Thursday (10 March), Prempeh said: “You’re [government] sitting here with a big economic mess; you’re here figuring out whether to go to IMF or to raise E-Levy. Moody’s is on your neck; Fitch is on your neck; all of these things are there and you’re going to make an arrest of somebody who says he’ll do a coup? The guy [Oliver] is still in the docks over this? For what? You [government] are converting him into a political prisoner.”
“…If you have charges, you bring it against him. You’ve kept him long enough… All this stuff, in my view, is an abuse of the judicial process to be treating this guy this way. That statement (by Barker-Vormawor) is no grounds for acting the way we’re acting.”
Coup here, coup there
He added that “basically, we’re making it look as if coup talk is taboo talk. There are coups in the region. We live in a region in West Africa that was once notorious for coups and at the same time, we were the region in West Africa that had made the most progress in democratisation at some point. To a point where ECOWAS came two votes shy of imposing a two-term limit on all countries for presidential office.
“…Come from that high point where we’ve had three coups in quick succession. So, if in that atmosphere people are beginning to talk about coups again, you don’t ban coup by prohibiting coup talk and besides, who says that the only form of instability we can have is a coup?” Prempeh asked.
Supreme Court strikes out application
Earlier, Lawyers for detained #FixTheCountry convener, Oliver Mawuse Barker-Vormawor, withdrew an application they filed at the Supreme Court seeking to quash a decision of the Tema High Court refusing their application for Habeas corpus, paving way for the Supreme Court to strike the application out as withdrawn.
In court
The lawyer for the applicant, Dr Justice Srem Sai, withdrew his application after all five Justices of the Supreme Court indicated that his application and the reliefs he is seeking are not properly before the highest Court of the land.
In a back-and-forth argument and counterarguments between the five Justices of the Supreme Court and the applicant’s lawyer, Dr Justice Srem Sai, the Court indicated that the application before them was a mixture of issues which in one breadth invokes their original jurisdiction and in another, their supervisory jurisdiction.
“This application is struck out as withdrawn” Justice Jones Victor Mawulorm Dotse, the presiding judge ruled.
