The Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, 2021, will be reintroduced to the Ninth Parliament for consideration and passage, the Speaker of Parliament, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has assured.
Describing the Eighth Parliament as history, he said all the businesses that were pending in the Eighth Parliament, including the bill, ended with that Parliament.
“And so we have a new Parliament and, therefore, what was pending there came to an end and had to be reintroduced, and so it (bill) was reintroduced,” he said.
Assurance
The Speaker gave the assurance after debate on whether a new bill must be reintroduced or the House must hold on to the previously passed bill and take steps to push the current President to assent to it after reservations against the bill were corrected.
He said that as the bill went through the process, the new government indicated that it wanted to take it as a public bill.
Bill
Mr Bagbin said as a private member's bill, members of the House took it up on the resumption of Parliament and got through the whole process as detailed out in the Standing Orders.
He, however, said as the bill went through the process, the new government indicated that they wanted to take it as a public bill.
The Speaker gave an assurance that the House would process the bill as a private member's bill.
Concurring that lots of work had already been done, Mr Bagbin assured the bill would have a smooth process in the House because “both sides of the House now support it”.
“And His Excellency the President has given indication that he is ready and willing at any time that it is passed by the House to ascend to it,” he said.
He assured the public that he wanted the bill to be properly passed so that its implementation would be easier.
He said there were a few things that the House’s attention had been drawn to, which the House together would work on so that “we pass the bill, it is a bill that is accepted by all, and we will definitely obey the prescription of the bill.”
Misgivings
Giving a directive on the way forward for the anti-gay bill on the floor of Parliament last Tuesday, Mr Bagbin expressed his misgivings about the challenges he had with former President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to whom the bill was transmitted to but refused to assent to it.
“They wrote to tell us that they would not assent, and the only constitutional error they committed was that they did not give us the reasons why they would not assent to it.
“And they did not transmit the bill back to us. They imprisoned it there, and so we did not get the bill back during the Ninth Parliament,” he said.
Passage
Earlier, the Majority Leader, Mahama Ayariga, took on the Minority members for pretending to Ghanaians that they were interested in the bill’s passage and creating a false impression that the National Democratic Congress (NDC), which worked to push the former President to assent to the bill, were no longer interested in the bill.
He told the House that President John Dramani Mahama had given an assurance of his readiness to assent to the bill if the current Parliament passed the bill.
