Parliament’s Legal and Constitutional Committee has recommended that the controversial cohabitation provisions from the property rights of the Spouses’ Bill should be expunged.
Parliament will take the recommendation into consideration and deliberate on whether to expunge the bill or not.
This, according to the committee, is to discourage unmarried couples from living together; a practice they say is frowned upon by the Ghanaian culture.
Cohabitation is a situation in which a man and woman hold themselves out to the public to be man and wife.
[contextly_sidebar id=”LKaGaZpqERFtN9Bv6F0icIunHZO5WGlk”]Interstate Succession Bill which was introduced in 2009 was expected to replace the Intestate Succession Act, 1985 (PNDC Law 111) when passed.
The Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee which were mandated to work on the bill justified the reason for the delay in its passage.
The Committee, spent over two years analyzing the bill due to the very sensitive issues of inheritance in Ghana it addresses.
The PNDC Law 111 stipulates that the distribution of the estate of a man who died without a will is determined by the customary law of inheritance of the area from which he hailed, or the type of marriage under which the deceased married.
This means a huge portion of the deceased properties is inherited by his customary successor or successors on behalf of the extended family, thereby cheating the female spouse and children of the deceased.
The bill was therefore aimed at rectifying the situation by giving more rights to women with regards to property of their deceased husbands.
It was also designed to give prominence to article 22 of the 1992 constitution which requires spouses, including unmarried couples, to have equal access to property jointly acquired in the course of the relationship when the union ends.
A member of the committee and MP for Offinso South, Ben Abdallah Banda, who disclosed this to Citi News, said the decision to expunge the bill is in the supreme interest of the country.
“Within the context of the law, a spouse is someone who has been legally married so where do we place cohabitation….at the end of the day, the consensus was that co habitation should be expunged from the law and indeed co habitation has infact been expunged from the law.”
The bill generated controversy when the Member of Parliament for Daboya Makarigu in the Northern Region, Nelson Abudu Baani, asked Parliament not to pass the bill since it was not favourable.
By: Marian Efe Ansah/citifmonline.com/Ghana
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