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Parliament on Friday jumped to the defence of the Second Deputy Speaker, Joe Ghartey, over his alleged refusal to appear before court to answer to questions regarding the sale of Ghana Telecom to Vodafone Plc. According to Parliament, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Essikado/Ketan did not run away from the court as was being alleged by some media publications. The Head of Legal Affairs in Parliament, Mr. Ebenezer Djietror, told journalists at a press conference that though the court had served a notice on the Second Deputy Speaker to appear before it, such was not the ideal way to serve a court process on the Speaker, Member or even a Clerk to Parliament. �A member cannot attend Parliament 24/7; he will definitely retire, and there are several ways to effect a court process on a Member, but certainly not the office of Clerk to Parliament. So it is wrong to say he had run away; he has been an Attorney-General (A-G); if a former A-G runs from court, then I don�t know who again will see the court as a pleasant place,� he stated. He said where the office of the Clerk of Parliament was chosen by the court to serve a notice of its process to Members of Parliament, it posed challenges to their work. �It is not for us to come between the member and the court officer. We cannot fault the court for issuing the process, but what we want is that the office of the clerk should be spared this agony.� To buttress his argument, Mr. Djietror said Article 117 and 118 of the 1992 Constitution of the Republic of Ghana was explicit on how, where, and when to serve a court process on a Member of Parliament or Speaker. Article 117 states: �Civil or criminal process, coming from any court or place out of Parliament, shall not be served on, or executed in relation to the Speaker or a member, or the Clerk to Parliament while he is on his way to, attending at, or returning from any proceedings of Parliament.� On the other hand, Article 118 states: �Neither the Speaker, nor a Member of, nor the Clerk to Parliament shall be compelled, while attending Parliament, to appear as a witness in any court or place out of Parliament.� According to Mr. Djietror, the Second Deputy Speaker could not have attended the court at that time, because he was officially assigned to represent the Speaker, Rt. Hon. Edward Doe Adjaho, in Abuja, Nigeria, at an event, but did disclose the details. He noted: �Being in Abuja was also the same as being in Parliament, because Hon. Ghartey was representing Ghana�s Parliament there.� Mr. Djietror maintained that his outfit takes strong exception to a situation where a court would forward notice of its process to a Speaker or a Member of Parliament, a situation, he argued, as was the case of the Second Deputy Speaker.