A private legal practitioner, Yaw Oppong, has said that the open invitation of informants by the Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) for questioning could intimidate and deter persons from volunteering information on acts of corruption.
“If we don’t take care we are now gradually going to treat informants as if they have committed an offence,” he warned.
His comment follows the BNI’s invitation of the Chief Executive Officer of Citi Fm, Samuel Attah-Mensah for questioning, over a publication on citifmonline.com concerning the arrest of a Ghanaian woman arrested in the UK for carrying cocaine.
[contextly_sidebar id=”UcLCN1eF73qG7eOeh5TFSrr4uCh85GZs”]The Editor of the Daily Graphic news paper, Ransford Tetteh was also invited over the same story.
The BNI has been widely criticized for the move while the Minority Spokesperson on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, Joe Osei-Owusu has described it as “undemocratic.”
Speaking on Citi Fm’s News Analysis programme, The Big Issue, the legal practitioner, Yaw Oppong indicated that this is not the first time the BNI had taken such action.
“The so called ‘chichinga’ Muntaka case, when Mr Ampong and his friends came out with this information, then the National security was instructed by the then President, Atta Mills, to set up a committee to look into the allegation. They freely went there, gave their evidence then the evidence they gave as witnesses was used against them,” he alleged.
Lawyer oppong further added that “the President authorized the head of civil service to dismiss them. It took very powerful fearless independent judges to declare to the President that you have no power to use evidence of a witness when you have not charged that person with any offence to use it against that person and that was wrong. And the court called for their reinstatement.”
On the cocaine saga issue, the lawyer condemned BNI’s action and said: “There is information that there have been in possession of someone narcotic drugs from Ghana, for me that is the most important aspect of that information than the ancillary matters about reference to passports and the things like that.”
“Mind you the person has even been arrested and taken to court about a week before this information came out. If we will just abandon these things, now when people see [that] offences are being committed they will just keep quite because instead of appreciating them for what they have said they will rather look at the form of the reportage and then conclude that unfortunately you have twisted some facts. What about the facts that were not twisted?” he questioned.
The UK High Commission to Ghana has since debunked claims by Ghana’s Narcotic Control Board’s (NACOB) that they helped in the arrest of Nayele Ametefe, the woman who was arrested for attempting to enter the UK with cocaine.
Ms. Nayele Ametefe was arrested on the 10th of November, 2014 for attempting to enter the UK with about 12kg of cocaine through the Heathrow Airport in London.
Nayele Amefe is however expected to return to court in the UK on 27th November over the matter.
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By: Godwin Allotey Akweiteh/citifmonline.com/Ghana