The Chief Justice has defended her decision to grant the Attorney General’s request to expedite the hearing of a case filed by National Democratic Congress (NDC) MP, Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor against the approval of some ministerial nominees.
Chief Justice Gertrude Torkonoo has come under a barrage of criticism with the largest opposition party accusing her of bias.
But addressing members of the Judicial Press Corps on a wide range of issues on Wednesday, April 4, she revealed that the content of the letter from the AG for the request was cogent enough to warrant her granting the request.
“Immediately a process is filed, or the date a process is filed you have a maximum of 21 days. Now give or take another two, three days for service, … so the instruction was that, wait for a minimum of 25 days, if no process is filed, then serve hearing notice, so that the court will sit.
“At that time, we’ll know that everybody’s been given all the opportunity given by the rules and they didn’t file their process. So we can deal with the motion on its merits. In this particular case, as soon as the case was filed, the Attorney General filed his response, he filed his affidavit in position, so the case was ripe for hearing.
“We were going to go on Easter break, and the Attorney General wrote and said this is a matter of governance. So could the court issue hearing notice for the case to be heard and the court was going to sit on the Wednesday. And so hearing notices were issued so that the applicant who filed the case himself, who should be interested in his case himself, will come to court, and all the two other respondents will also come to court. So the bailiff went to serve all of them with hearing notice, and when the court sat on that Wednesday, it formed part of our list,” she said.
The Chief Justice said she knew that the applicants, Speaker of Parliament and Attorney General, had all been served.
Speaking on the generalities of the arrangements, she added “So we dealt with the application on its merit and moved on it.”
Background
On March 27, the Supreme Court dismissed an application brought forth by South Dayi MP, Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, contesting the approval of new ministerial and deputy ministerial nominees.
In a unanimous decision, a five-member panel of the court deemed the application frivolous and an abuse of the court process.
Rockson-Nelson Dafeamekpor, the applicant, had aimed to halt the vetting process in Parliament until his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the President’s decision to reassign Ministers without Parliament’s involvement was resolved.
However, the Supreme Court concluded that the MP’s case lacked direct relevance to the nominees under consideration in Parliament, as it primarily pertained to reassigned Ministers.
ALSO READ: