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June 29, 2006
The Legislative Process
This morning I found myself at a press conference celebrating the recent enactment of Ghana's Disability Law, a bill similar to the Americans with Disabilities Act. It aims to provide equal access for the disabled to education, employment, transportation and health care.
The bill's passage is apparently a classic example of years of inactivity followed by a legislative sprint. To take an example I learned much more about today, a domestic violence bill working its way through Parliament has been under consideration since 1999. It's not uncommon for bills to get "lost" for years, since they are filed in paper to a single secretary.
(Consider for a moment the ease with which we can to go Thomas or CQ and research a bill's history, see and search its language and view related public laws. In Ghana, finding existing statutes takes crawling through paper or shelling out for a pricey CD-ROM that contains all the country's laws.)
In 2001 the attorney general, who oversees all legislation, as well as the justice ministry, picked up the bill and began to circulate it among the cabinet. The cabinet decided an education campaign was needed, though that was put off after a cabinet reshuffling in 2004. Eventually a "sensitization program" rolled out into the countryside, and the word coming back was that there was support for the bill but not its provision overturning Ghana's spouse-beating law.
Current law says that the marriage contract implies consent to abuse-this type of thing is sometimes referred to as a marital rape law, since that is essentially what it allows. Because of mixed reviews from the education campaign, the marital rape repeal got pulled from the bill. (The bill still contains prohibitions against "grievous harm," psychological and economic violence, and adds legal and health protections for the abused. It also would mandate that one spouse disclose an HIV-positive status to the other.)
Were these mixed reviews documented? If so, does that document exist? No one outside the government has seen it, raising suspicions that the claims are not accurate. In any case, few women, culturally speaking, would think of marital rape as a crime. At a recent workshop put on by the police to educate Parliament, members laughed at the notion of psychological abuse.
So there is a long way to go, which was and is true of the Disability Law too. Each bill comes up for a weeklong public comment period. As you might imagine, unless the public gets tipped off to when a bill is coming up and its contents, it is very difficult to put together meaningful commentary in a short amount of time. Still, there are respected NGOs whose advice makes its way into the final products.
The difficulties remain because of questions about the Disability Law's implementation. The country has 10 years to come into compliance, but it's far from clear the political will, attention and money exist to get there. The only question a member of the press asked at the briefing was about this next step, and we got a vague answer. But some there speculated that now that organizations of disabled groups have used the channels through which they succeeded, they can do so again.
Apparently the reporter's lone question was not uncommon. (Among about 30 people in attendance there were perhaps four reporters.) The press, I was told, rarely engages in much back and forth in a press-conference situation. One reason for this quiescence, I found out later, may be that reporters get paid by the organizations for their coverage. It's not technically legal, but it goes on regularly. I found the briefing unorthodox in a few other ways, too. It opened and closed with a prayer, for example, and the hot atmosphere and laconic delivery of speech after speech belied the jubilation in the words of each of the speakers. On either end, highlife music bracketed the program, and when it was all over the staff served refreshments.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at June 29, 2006 02:15 PM