'Speed Up Passage Of Freedom Of Information Bill'

Vice-President Mahama being presented with a shield by Ms Lamptey, at the opening session of the 2011 National Conference on Intergrity

The Vice-President, Mr John Dramani Mahama, has urged Parliament to speed up processes for the passage of the Freedom of Information Bill.

He said Cabinet had already approved the bill, and that there was the need for Parliament to pass it into law to support efforts at fighting corruption in the country.

Mr Mahama was opening a three-day conference on “Integrity in Ghana” in Accra Wednesday.

It is being organised by the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) on the theme: “Building a robust ethics infrastructure to promote integrity in Ghana”.

The conference seeks to consolidate the measures and initiatives undertaken to build a strong national integrity system in Ghana and chart the way forward in establishing a strong national integrity system as a method of reducing opportunities for corruption and rent seeking.

The Vice-President said the draft of the Freedom of Information Bill had been ready as far back as 11 years ago.

He said now that Cabinet had approved the bill, it was appropriate that Parliament treated it with some urgency for it to serve the intended purpose.

Mr Mahama called for the enforcement of existing anti-corruption legislation to fight corruption in the country and underscored the need for internal control mechanisms to check corruption in public service agencies.

He supported the call for more funding for anti-corruption agencies, since that would enable them to discourage and expose corruption and consequently save some revenue for the state.

Mr Mahama said there was the need for the country to take a second look at some areas of the asset declaration regime, especially the verification of the assets declared and some of the requirements in the asset declaration forms.

He supported the need for undercover investigations to expose corruption and called for a debate on the use of video recordings as evidence in courts.

A Supreme Court judge, Mr Justice Date-Bah, who spoke on the theme of the conference, called for effective co-ordination among anti-corruption agencies and urged the government to allocate more resources to the anti-corruption agencies to enable them to prosecute their work.

He stressed the need for the capacity of the police and other investigative officers to be enhanced to facilitate their investigations.

Justice Date-Bah again asked the government to provide the relevant technological apparatus to support the work of the investigative bodies and said investigators had to be more proactive and embark on more under-cover operations

The Chief Justice, Mrs Justice Georgina Theodora Wood, who chaired the occasion, said corruption was the bane of socio-economic development, hence the need for it to be fought from all angles.

She reiterated the commitment of the Judiciary to support efforts at fighting corruption in the country.

The Commissioner of CHRAJ, Ms Lauretta Vivian Lamptey, said it had become imperative for CHRAJ and other stakeholders to address the problem of corruption through the promotion of integrity, since corruption was a source of moral decay.

Therefore, she said, the conference was aimed at generating public awareness of the social and economic cost of corruption, foster the creation of a positive and non-partisan approach towards combating it and securing the requisite political will for fighting corruption.