OccupyGhana Condemns Police Inferior Tactics

The penchant of the Ghana Police Service to resort to ex parte injunctions to stop demonstrations has been condemned by OccupyGhana, a fast-growing pressure group.

According to them, the one-sided approach of hiding behind the courts to frustrate organizers of demonstrations must not be encouraged.

'OccupyGhana is extremely concerned about the practice whereby the Ghana Police Service easily obtains ex parte injunctions to stop demonstrations in Ghana and the use of those one-sided injunctions as an excuse to brutalise persons who embark on demonstrations in Ghana,' the group said in statement yesterday.

The police have come under severe criticism for the way in which they surreptitiously secured injunction to retrain the Let My Vote Count Alliance (LMVCA) demonstrators from presenting their petition on a new voters register to the Electoral Commission (EC)

Interestingly, the police reportedly gave a flimsy excuse at an Accra Circuit that they had intelligence that armed robbers were planning attack on Accra and that was enough to persuade a judge to grant an injunction restraining the LMVC demonstrators.

Right to demonstrate
However, OccupyGhana said in the statement that 'the right of Ghanaians to demonstrate is enshrined in and protected by Article 21(1) (d) of the Constitution, which guarantees the 'freedom of assembly including freedom to take part in processions and demonstrations.

'It is instructive that although this right is so clearly and notoriously provided in the Constitution, the police, even after the Constitution came into force, insisted on enforcing the contrary provisions of the erstwhile 1972 Public Order Decree that provided for obtaining the police's permission before one could demonstrate,' they stated.

They said that 'thankfully, this anachronistic and unconstitutional permission was firmly consigned to the dustbin of history by the Supreme Court in the seminal case of the New Patriotic Party v. the Inspector-General of Police on 30^th November 1993.'

Public Order Act
'It was only after this decision that parliament passed the current Public Order Act that requires simply giving the police a 5-day clear notice of an event.'

OccupyGhana said that under the current Act, the police have no power to stop the event, and may merely request its postponement or relocation.

'If the police and the persons seeking to demonstrate are unable to agree to postpone or relocate the demonstration, the police are then required to apply to the court for an order that can only restrain holding the event on the proposed date or at the proposed location. Nothing more.

Application on notice
They said under the law 'all of the applications required by law to be made to a court must be made with notice to the affected party,' adding 'indeed, proceeding on ex-parte basis which is the instance of one party only and without notice to any person adversely interested should be the exception and not the norm.

'It is in the light of these strict conditions for obtaining ex parte injunctions that we are shocked at the current practice where the Police routinely file and obtain such injunctions simply to stop or scuttle demonstrations, and never follow up with the application on notice.'

Police Mischief
They said, 'Clearly, the Ghana Police Service is being mischievous in this regard, and we are also extremely concerned about the willingness of the court to grant such ex-parte orders and then not sanction the police when it is so clear that the processes and machinery of the court are being abused by the Ghana Police Service.

The group said 'the recent tussle between the police and the LMVC group typifies this abuse of the court's processes by the police.

'We condemn these acts of the police in no uncertain terms. The time has come for the Police to show to Ghanaians that it exists to serve all of us, and not just to protect the interest of those in power.

'This clearly unconstitutional scuttling of a right guaranteed by the Constitution and re-affirmed by the Supreme Court ought to stop and stop immediately.'

By William Yaw Owusu