The Editor of the Searchlight, Kenneth Kuranchie, has formally petitioned the Commissioner on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), urging him to investigate the conduct of the immediate past President, Jerry John Rawlings.
The petition catalogued among other things, some of the acts and utterances of the former president, which tended to portray him as a bully, and an anti-democrat.
The petition also accused the former president of abusing his office to amass wealth, the Daily Guide newspaper reports.
In the petition dated February 27 2001, Mr. Kuranchie chronicled a litany of Rawlings’s alleged human right abuses and also engagement in acts which not only directly or indirectly enabled him to acquire illegal wealth but also for breaching sections of the 1992 Constitution with impunity.
Mr. Kuranchie’s additional claim is that, it is improper for Rawlings to accept a position from the United Nations as its eminent person for the year 2001 without seeking clearance from Parliament as stipulated by Article 68 (2) of the Fourth Republican Constitution.
He also accused the former president of failing to declare his assets at the time of leaving office.
This act, he said is in gross contravention of Article 280 (1) (b) (c) of the Constitution which requires public officers, including the President to declare his assets at the time of accession or ascension of office, and at the time of leaving office.
The petition also accused the former president of having shunned the mandatory Constitutional demand that a president upon leaving office, must present “a state of the nation address” either before Parliament or on state broadcast media (radio and television nation-wide broadcast), before the final suspension of the Second Parliament of the Fourth Republic.
Source: GhanaWeb
