The former Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Petroleum Authority (GNPC) says the law on willfully causing financial loss to the state is not constitutional.
“It is not constitutional because the terms of that law are not defined in written law.
“The constitution is very clear that people should only be charged or convicted for offences which are defined in written law,” he told the mediamen after addressing a public forum in Accra last week.
An earlier story put out on Myjoyonline wrongly quoted Tsatsu Tsikata as calling for the maintenance of the law in Ghana's statutes.
What Tsatsu said in response to a question of whether he thought the law should be maintained or scrapped, was that the issue was really not one of whether to scrap it or to maintain it, but whether it met the constitutional requirement.
“For me the issue is not about whether it should be repealed or not; the issue is whether it meets the constitutional standards of criminal legislation.”
He bemoaned what he said was the practice where some judges would make references from the dictionary to interpret the constitution.
“We have a situation where justices like Justice Afreh resort to an ordinary Oxford Dictionary or something to define a term but the constitution doesn’t say that these offences should be as defined in dictionaries; the constitution says they should be defined in a written law."
[Listen to the attached audio]
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