Parliament\u2019s Committee on Subsidiary Legislation has rejected accusations they supported a law which will in effect, bring back the criminal libel law.<\/p>\n
The Committee said the\u00a0recently passed Content Standards Regulation is simply aimed at vetting broadcast content before being aired.<\/p>\n
[contextly_sidebar id=”wCruaLpU5a9W3Va8vKAvTB2R1rQFgriz”]It empowers the National Media Commission (NMC) to grant content authorization to an electronic operator or revoke same if it goes contrary to the Legislative instrument.<\/p>\n
Failure to do so will attract a fine not less than five thousand units or a term of imprisonment of not less than two years and in some cases, both.<\/p>\n
The Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association (GIBA) has since declared its\u00a0intention\u00a0to head to the Supreme Court to seek interpretation of the new Legislative Instrument passed by Parliament last year.<\/p>\n
They had initially petitioned the NMC as well as the Parliamentary Select Committee on Subsidiary Legislation and Communication and Legal and Parliamentary Affairs to have the regulation scrapped.<\/p>\n
A member of the Committee which worked on the Legislative Instrument, Kofi Osei Ameyaw, spoke to Citi News<\/strong> and said the legislation is in Ghana\u2019s interest.<\/p>\n According to Mr Ameyaw, the committee thoroughly vetted the proposal leading to this Legislative Instrument.<\/p>\n He said the committee’s constitutional responsibility is to aid the NMC to protect\u00a0the nation, since GIBA did not have its own code of conduct that regulated content applicability.<\/p>\n According to him, \u201cOnce the document comes before the committee, the committee looks at the document and look at the regulation that they seek approval from parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we looked at the totality, we came to the conclusion that the document was good enough to check content that filmmakers, storytellers, bring out to the public,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n \u201cThe work that the committee has to do must come from an instrumentality. In this particular case, the instrumentality is the National Media Commission.\u201d<\/p>\n He further justified\u00a0the need for this control mechanism to check content \u201cespecially when the welfare of a child is concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n By: Delali Adogla-Bessa\/citifmonline.com\/Ghana<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Parliament\u2019s Committee on Subsidiary Legislation has rejected accusations they supported a law which will in effect, bring back the criminal libel law. The Committee said the\u00a0recently passed Content Standards Regulation is simply aimed at vetting broadcast content before being aired. [contextly_sidebar id=”wCruaLpU5a9W3Va8vKAvTB2R1rQFgriz”]It empowers the National Media Commission (NMC) to grant content authorization to an electronic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=179588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179588\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=179588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=179588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=179588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}