Are we going to allow Aisha Huang to go again? - Ace Ankomah asks AG

Ace Anan Ankomah, a private legal practitioner is asking the Attorney General, (AG) if he will issue a nolle prosequi for the second time without prosecuting Chinese national and galamsey - illegal small-scale mining - kingpin, Aisha Huang.

According to him, this is a foreigner who breached the laws of Ghana sometime back by engaging in galamsey and instead

Read full articleof prosecuting her she was deported.

Giving a trajectory of events that the OccupyGhana group has been engaged in since the issue of Aisha Huang broke in 2017, Ace Ankomah, a member of the group, explained on Citi TV that "somewhere around May 2017, we got wind that she had been arrested, and she was charged with petty administrative issues when there was evidence that without a proper license, she was mining but she was charged with some immigration thing – that she did not file immigration papers.

"So, on May 16, 2017, we petitioned the Attorney General, AG, and said you must charge her with the relevant offences; we cited the sections in the Minerals and Mining Act that in our view create the offence that must be filed against her. The AG received our petition and filed the proper charges; on May 24, 2017, we issued a fresh statement acknowledging the fresh charges and said now let's see and she was bolted out of this country…those charges would have sent her to jail for 20 years…the President admitted that sending Aisha Huang away was a slap in the face of Ghanaians…"

He continued: "apparently, she has been in the country from the beginning of the year, this is interesting but this is the point, they allowed her to go. We told the President about it; today she is back because we didn’t jail her and we didn’t even give the court the opportunity to even free her.

"So, if she is back, she has run into our arms are we going to free her again? Are we going to make anothe167426r mistake because the President admit it was a mistake?…if we didn’t jail Aisha Huang, who can we jail?" he quizzed.

Ace Ankomah is of the view that in order to win the galamsey fight, Aisha Huang must be prosecuted, and if she wins her case, fine, but if she loses, she serves the prison term, else no Ghanaian will be prosecuted when a Chinese who is also breaching the same laws of the country is made to walk freely.

"That is why we say the day we let her go was the day we lost the fight against galamsey. Thank God she has come back into our waiting arms, so, what do we do; let’s take her through the judicial process, if she wins, she wins; if she loses, she loses. But you cannot jail a Ghanaian when you allow the Chinese to run away," he stressed.

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