The Domestic Violence Coalition urging a speedy passage of the Domestic Violence Bill says it will hit the streets soon if government does not speed up action to get it into law. The Coalition says the undue delay is worrying because numerous provisions in the Bill, even if it becomes and Act would require subsidiary legislation to make the provisions operational. The DV bill was passed by Parliament on February 21 but has still not received presidential assent despite assurances by the Attorney General's Office. A member of the DV Coalition Angela Dwamena Aboagye, told Joy News the delay in operationalizing the Act has them worried. She said the subsidiary legislation could take as long as two years, and wondered if the bill, which is to help the vulnerable in society and provide help for the helpless, is of much importance to the government. According to her government should attach the same sense of urgency to the legislation as it has done with others in the past due to its importance. “It’s one of those things where you are tempted to believe that when it comes to legislations that the government deems fitting anything can be done, as for example taking it under a certificate of urgency and quickly assenting to it as it did with the ROPA (Representation of the Peoples Amendment) Law and things like that. So it makes you wonder whether it has that kind of status before the government…” The Deputy Attorney General, Kwame Osei Prempeh however told Joy News the enormity of work to be done on the Act before it receives presidential assent has caused the delay. He said after a proofreading of the document, it was sent to Parliament where it spent three weeks because the officer working on it was on sick leave. From there the bill went to the AG’s office for the second proofreading and from where it was sent to the Assembly Press for the printer’s proof. Osei Prempeh said the bill only returned to the AG’s office on Monday, April 16, and legislating drafting officials are crosschecking to see if all is well. It will from there revisit the printers and finally rechecked to make sure the legal document rid of all corrections and it is what it ought to be. “The bill has not gotten to where the President can put his assent on. It is now being transformed into the Act. All the corrections are being done. Let me say that the work on it is enormous because so many amendments were made in Parliament, so many things were changed, and many mistakes were in the version sent to our ministry and there it needs painstaking effort to do all this.”