President of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe has stated that the Supreme Court risks losing ‘considerable legitimacy’ if it rules that voter’s ID card and birth certificate are not proof of identity in the upcoming voter’s registration exercise.
There is a current case in the Supreme Court brought by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) against the Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana’s decision to exclude voter’s ID card and birth certificates as proof of identity in its upcoming mass registration exercise–on the grounds that they are not credible proof of Ghanaian citizenship.
The EC is arguing in court that: “In respect of the cards issued pursuant to ci 12, the 2nd Defendant (EC) has found that those voter identification cards were issued without any form of identification at all and its ineligibilities, breaches and excesses were imported into the 2012 register pursuant to CI 72 in breach of Article 42 and displacing the credibility of the CI 12 cards”.
In a Facebook post, Franklin Cudjoe has said Ghana’s Democracy will suffer if the Sumpre Court agrees with the EC’s position.
He said: “Let us make no mistake about this, any court that rules that birth certificates and/or voter ID cards can be rejected for voting identification purposes shall immediately lose considerable legitimacy, dragging the Judiciary into this quagmire of democratic ruin. But should the courts restore the validity of those documents, after the EC has completed its worthless exercise of disenfranchising all current voters and re-registering them afresh for no sensible reason, the EC shall be forced to re-open registration, throwing the electoral calendar into an even worse mess than it currently is in”.
Judgment of the case is scheduled for June 23.
Source: GhanaFeed.Com
