A parliamentary committee in Ghana has advanced an amended right to information bill for consideration by the full Parliament.
The Select Committee on Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs has reviewed the bill and presented its report to Parliament, according to sources in Ghana and media reports.
The committee accepted many of the changes proposed by the Coalition on Right to Information, a development welcomed by one leading supporter of the bill who wrote that “they accepted all and more.”
RTI advocates have been told that Parliament will debate and pass the bill in this sitting of Parliament. The committee report was not yet available on the Parliament’s website.
Legislation has been pending for years, and this is the first time it has been formally advanced by a committee. In September, the committee had agreed to make many of the changes urged by the Coalition. (See previous FreedomInfo.org.) Problems with in the exemption section, the Coalition said at the time, were resolved through the inclusion of a harm test.
Mena Mensah, the Africa Regional Coordinator of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), urged Ghanaians to be adamant for passage of the bill, according to an article in Spy Ghana.
Passage of the an RTI law is one of the government’s Open Government Partnership action plan, whose life is ending this month. The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information made a mission to Accra to express this concern to government.
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