Finder Editor Freed Following Arrest At Parliament

A leading member of the Right to Information Coalition, Elvis Darko, has been released after being held in police custody for over an hour for holding a placard near Parliament, during the 2019 budget reading.

Elvis Darko was with other members of the coalition who held various placards calling for the Right to Information Bill, which is currently before Parliament, to be passed immediately.

According to him, they were quietly waiting for other members of the group while holding their placards outside the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC), across the road from Parliament House, when some police and military personnel approached them and ordered them to leave the area.

He said the military personnel snatched one of the placards from a member of the group, destroyed it and dumped it in a bin.

“Some police and military people were saying that we should not come close to Parliament. We were standing on the pavement that will lead you to the conference center, directly opposite parliament's gate… We were about 5 at the time because we were waiting for more people to come. We were not doing anything, we were just standing and and holding a placard that said 'pass RTI Bill'…. I was taking pictures of those guys holding the placard to post on social media when three police officers rushed from the parliament end [and said] that we should leave,” he narrated to Citi News.

Elvis Darko said the police and military officer arrested him when he attempted to take a photo of the officer destroying their placard without cause.

Narrating the incident on Eyewitness News, he said the officers immediately seized his phone and drove him to the police station where he was denied access to his phone when he asked to make a call.

“When I demanded that the phone is my private property so they should give it to me, they held me and said they have arrested me. I followed them and they drove to the police station… The officer said I have been arrested so I sat at counterback.”

He said the police inspector began scrolling through his phone's photo gallery to get quotes from the placard to complete a report they were filing.

After several minutes behind the police counter, Elvis said the commander of the Police Station arrived and invited him to his office.

He said the commander “was trying to tell me at that under the public order act, once we were holding a placard we should have written to them.”

Elvis said when other journalists arrived at the police station to make inquiries about his arrest, the police denied that he had been detained and subsequently handed him his phone.

“The Commander, after listening to what had happened said he would not accept that arrest so he revoked that decision and allowed me to go,” he told the show’s host, Umaru Sanda Amadu.

Elvis Darko, who is the Editor of the Finder Newspaper, is a leading member of the coalition that is pushing for the Right to Information Bill to be passed.

The Bill has been in and out of Parliament for about 20 years.

About RTI
The right to information is a fundamental human right guaranteed by the country's 1992 Constitution and recognized as a right under International Conventions on Human rights.

The Bill as it has been drafted, is to give substance to Article 21 (1) (f) of the Constitution which states that “All persons shall have the right to information subject to such qualifications and laws as are necessary in a democratic society”.