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A senior lecturer at the University Of Ghana School Of Law, Dr Raymond Atuguba has virtually laid to rest controversies surrounding the Supreme Court’s verdict on the latest Abu Ramadan Case.

The order of the Supreme Court to the Electoral Commission was to take immediate steps to delete names of persons who used National Health Insurance Cards as proof of identification to get onto the voter’s register.

Until this intervention by lawyer Atuguba, many good Ghanaians including lawyers had made categorical statements that the apex court ordered the EC to automatically delete NHI registrants and that there is no law presently supporting the presence of NHI card holders in the voter’s register, therefore, the election management team must introduce a new CI to deal with the situation.

However, sharing his thoughts on the judgment on Joy Fm’s weekend News analysis programme, ‘News File’, Dr Atuguba, disagreed; insisting that the Supreme Court did not order automatic deletion of names.

He said, "The court did not order that they should be automatically taken out and the Court did not order that they should be struck down."

The former Executive Secretary to President Mahama explained that if the Court was so minded, it could have on its own, "struck out the names of all persons who do not qualify to vote. They have the power to do that but they declined to do that."

According to Dr. Atuguba, the Supreme Court could "have ordered the Electoral Commission to automatically take out all the names of all the people who shouldn't be on the register… the Supreme Court declined to do that."

The respected law lecturer also explained that suggestions by some lawyers that there is no law outlining procedure for carrying out the Supreme Court’s order are wrong.

Taking on the host of the programme, Samson Lardi Ayenini, himself a lawyer, who has also argued that there is no law for deleting NHI card registrants, Dr Atuguba noted “If today, you discover or know that somebody is on the register and should not be on the register you have to use legal processes available for getting those names off. This method is through CI 91.

You know there are district complaints committees which are setup for this process. The only thorny legal point in this judgment is actually a matter that no one has raised so far. The only thing that can be said to be a little unclear in the case is something I haven’t heard anybody raised…but that procedure entails two things: a process initiated by a voter and a process initiated, sua sponte, by the Electoral Commission itself.”

Asked by the host those who registered with NHI cards will still remain on the register if a challenge was not raised during the impending registration, the law lecturer retorted “that is not true. CI 91 provides for a mechanism where the Electoral Commission itself can clean the register … CI 91 is clear. The way in which the media interprets statements is problematic. I was astounded yesterday when I saw all the newspapers, Daily Graphic, Times, Daily Guide, Statesman attributing to Justice Dotse what he did not say.”

Explaining why the EC said it cannot unilaterally delete names, Raymond Atuguba noted that “the EC cannot unilaterally delete names because CI 91 has a procedure where the person whose name is about to be deleted can protect his right to vote to the extent that, that process exists, the process is not unilateral.

By unilateral it means the EC on its own takes the register and says oooh I don’t like your black face; off, I don’t like you red face; off; that is unilateral.”

“…Exactly that is what I have been saying from the beginning that there are two mechanisms either a voter comes and says I object to this name because this person is dead or an EC official says…and that is why my advice to the EC is to send out a notice saying to the people of Ghana, if you have information about the names of people who shouldn’t be on the register including NHI registrants, bring them and even if you as an individual cannot go through the procedure for deleting them we as the Electoral Commission will do,” he noted.

“Remember that the Supreme Court has the power to strike down legislation as unconstitutional. The only outstanding legal issue in the Abu Ramadan Case is whether there is any path of the Supreme Court judgment that impliedly strikes down a path of CI 91. That is the only outstanding issue. I think that if the EC uses the process in CI 91 and that process is unable to catch all the persons who make the current register unclean then that process is impliedly changed to the extent that of the Abu Ramadan judgment.

The procedure in CI 91, if executed to the latter can satisfy the judgment of the Supreme Court as far as the two routes are used. The routes are where an ordinary voter comes to make a challenge and the route where EC official, sua sponte, makes a challenge.

If nobody makes a challenge, EC officials can make the challenge. Order of the court is that they should do it according to law. Every order of a court is presume to mean that order should be carried out legally because the court of law is presumed to act according to law,” lawyer Dr Raymond Atuguba addressed.