Trying Times Ahead for John Mahama

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Parent Category: Justice & Security

Created on Sunday, 05 May 2013 00:00

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Trying Times Ahead for John Mahama

...As Defence Counsels argue on administrative and transposition errors on the part of the Electoral Commission in the Presidential Election Petition of 2012?

The OmanbaPa Research Group

Keywords: judicial review, errors of law, pink-sheets, administrative errors, transposition errors, electoral commission, electoral irregularities, voting without biometric verification, over-voting, ghost polling stations, faked foreign voters’ list, statutory violations, Supreme Court, annulment of results

MEMO: JUDICIAL REVIEW

Dear Principal, In the Great Britain, Constitutional and Administrative law is an exciting area of study because it is here that we could learn about how the constitutional and administrative powers or actions of the decision-maker, usually, the public officer or institution- including the courts, could be held in check through the process known as “Judicial Review, now regulated by RSC, Ord. 53. The subject matter of every judicial review is a decision made by some person- here, Electoral Commissioner Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan or body of persons- for example, the Electoral Commission of Ghana, whom we will call the “decision-maker”. The [in]actions or omissions of the decision-maker are subject to judicial review. Judicial review is distinguished from an appeal in that an appeal is concerned with the merits of the decision under appeal while judicial review is concerned only with the legality of the decision or act under review. In the GCHQ Case (1985), Lord Diplock classified the grounds on which administrative action [and in our present example- the Electoral Commission,] is subject to judicial control under three heads: 'illegality', 'irrationality', and 'procedural impropriety'. Diplock LJ also said that further grounds may be added as the law developed on a case-by-case basis. The issue then is, was the 2012 No-Verification-No-Vote (NVNV) subject to JR?