Cambridge Researcher, Oliver Barker-Vormawor, says the Anti-LGBT bill, currently being pushed to Parliament, is an absurd piece of legislation.

He said the bill needs to be critically looked at if its sponsors want it passed into law.

According to him, aside from the “terrible” drafting of the bill, its logic is equally absurd and gives the impression that the bill’s sponsors do not want it to be passed by Parliament.

He specifically referred to a part of the proposed bill which criminalises calling others or persons accused or suspected of being part of the LGBT group ‘gay’ as a means of protecting ‘gay’ people.

He said, “One of the things it seeks to do is that by its own logic, it seems to say that it is protecting persons who are LGBTQI or all the things it says in there and persons who are suspected or accused of being such. 

“And one of the protections it is supposed to offer is that if anybody then calls another person ‘gay’, then the accuser has injured the suspected person [defamed] and so it protects the gay person by saying that by your act of calling the person ‘gay’ you have committed a criminal offence.”

Oliver Barker-Vormawor speaking on JoyNews on Friday stated that should the said logic of the proposed bill be followed to the letter, then its promoters would also inadvertently be committing a criminal offence.

He said, “From what I have heard, what they have been saying consistently is, even in promoting this bill and talking about it, they would themselves be engaging in a criminal offence.

"This is because they’ll then be engaging in a process where without any basis they’ll be referring to certain persons as being gay or suspected of being gay.”

He added, “That practice alone makes it difficult to know the real intent of what they’re trying to do. Unless, of course, and it is a possibility, that what they’re trying to do is that they craft a document that is so absurd that it doesn’t even pass parliament. Maybe that’s what they’re really committed to doing here.”

He further stated that “As long as it’s concerned, all I know is that it is a terribly drafted piece of legislation that goes beyond what it seeks to do and that it is so absurd in the way it has been drafted.

“Very terribly drafted that one is inclined to wonder whether they’re serious about the document.  And this is not about me telling them what they want to do and what they have to do.

“I am saying that I cannot see how a parliament of Ghana, properly elected, can pick this document and pass it. It doesn’t make sense,” he concluded.