In a rather shocking turn of event, the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has withdrawn its request asking the Supreme Court to rule that the Electoral Commission does not have the power to compile a new voter’s register.
The NDC has filed for two reliefs but during proceedings today, the Supreme Court forced the party to make a choice between the two, forcing the legal counsel of the NDC, Godwin Edudzi Tamakloe to opt for the relief seeking to stop the EC from invalidating the current Voter ID card as a primary document for registration.
The relief which the NDC was forced to abandon was that which sought the apex court to bar the EC from compiling a new register.
The decision, therefore, means that the NDC will not oppose the compilation of a new register, rather, it must use the data from the current register, including validating the current Voter ID cards as a valid primary document to register in the new register for the issuance of a new card.
The EC in its Constitutional Instruments to the Ghanaians Parliament on the conduct of the December 2020 elections had stated that only Ghanaian passports and the newly issued national ID cards are the only valid primary documents for registration in the new register.
Essentially, the NDC’s lawsuit will now be focused mainly on fighting for the existing voters’ card to be valid. However, the EC calls the current card as the fruit of a “poisoned tree”.
Meanwhile, legal luminaries are divided in their opinion of what transpired at the Supreme Court today. The popular US-based Ghanaian law Professor, Kwaku Asare corrected impressions that the NDC could not have pleaded for alternative reliefs when the Supreme Court gave it an option of only one relief from its original two.
“The impression must not be created that plaintiffs cannot plead for alternative reliefs. They can! The Court cannot force a Plaintiff to choose one of these three reliefs. If the Court suggests that the Plaintiff choose one, Plaintiff has to explain why the three reliefs can coexist and leave it to the Court to determine whether it only wants to rule on one of them,” Kwaku Asare stated.
Conversely, another lawyer and an Executive Fellow at the Institute of Law and Public Affairs (ILPA), Justice Srem–Sai thinks the NDC’s move not to plead for alternative relief was tactical.
The constitutional lawyer in a brief post on Facebook, wrote:” let’s see why relief 2 – a declaration that the existing voter ID should be part of the identification documents – doesn’t change NDC’s case: If the Court rules that the existing voter ID should be a part of the identification documents, it’ll mean that all the holders of that card will be eligible to be registered.”
According to him, the NDC will still fulfil its original purpose for the lawsuit if the Supreme Court rules that the existing voters’ ID cards are valid. In that case, it will reinforce the NDC’s position that the EC should not be allowed to create a new register, but it will be essentially reviewing the existing one.
Justice Sai explained: “This also means that the product of the proposed exercise will be a REVISION of the existing voter register rather than the CREATION of a new one (which is NDC’s relief 1 anyway). We all (including the EC members) claim our Ghanaian citizenship through people who claimed to be Ghanaians. But how did the first batch of “Ghanaians” prove their citizenship?
“Did some people guarantee for them? If so, did the guarantors use a voter id, birth certificates, passports, etc? If they used any documents, how were those documents invented?”
According to the analysis from Justice Sai, the legitimate way of treating those supposed ineligible names that the EC seeks to clampdown on in the current register is to have them deleted by means of processes established in law, as was done in the Abu Ramadan lawsuit prior to the 2016 elections.
Meanwhile, the court has adjourned the case to June 23, 2020, even though the EC has already set June 30, 2020, as the date to commence the compilation of its controversial new register.