General News of Thursday, 23 February 2023
Source: www.ghanaweb.live
2023-02-23We have reached the end of the tunnel - Sam George says ahead of LGBTQ bill being laid in March
Sam George, Member of Parliament for Ningo Prampram
Member of Parliament for Ningo-Prampram and sponsor of the Promotion of Proper Human Sexual Rights and Ghanaian Family Values Bill, 2021, popularly called Anti-LGBTQ+, Sam Nartey Geroge, has hinted that the bill will be presented before the house in March, 2023.
This comes after the committee on the bill met with the Attorney General Wednesday, February 22, 2023, after which
Read full article.he indicated that he was okay with the bill.
Speaking in an interview he said; “I can see that we now have a light at the end of the tunnel. We have reached the end of the tunnel. And we'll be bringing that report hopefully before the end of March or before this house rises and laying it before the house for debates on the floor. And so watch this space."
"We are in a good place. And we'll be looking forward to you giving us all the support to pass this landmark bill, which will be the first of its kind. Yesterday the Attorney General made that point the first of its kind on African continent. Nigeria has a bill banning same-sex marriages. That's all. It doesn't have all the other things our bill has. And so we're excited about this," Sam George added.
He said that the concerns that were raised by the Attorney General had been dealt with.
“The Attorney General raises some fundamental issues on cost and on some human rights issues. We drew his attention yesterday that most of the issues he was raising were issues that we had already dealt with. I believe that the bill when it comes for example, and I can give you one of the concessions that had been made earlier in the committee had to do with the issue of intersex. If you read the original bill, you will see that we criminalised a number of expressions of homosexuality, but stated in our bill that intersects was considered a biological anomaly.
“The Attorney General agreed with the view of the committee, which we had met with earlier that if we were not criminalising intersex, and we're recognising it even original bill as a biological anomaly, then we should take it out of the bill completely. So that the bill focuses on the things that we are criminalising,” he said in an interview.
