{"id":1255631,"date":"2022-11-22T11:15:02","date_gmt":"2022-11-22T11:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/11\/22\/frank-davies-questions-reliance-of-key-expert-witness-in-jomoro-election-petition\/"},"modified":"2022-11-22T11:15:02","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T11:15:02","slug":"frank-davies-questions-reliance-of-key-expert-witness-in-jomoro-election-petition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/11\/22\/frank-davies-questions-reliance-of-key-expert-witness-in-jomoro-election-petition\/","title":{"rendered":"Frank Davies questions reliance of key expert witness in Jomoro election petition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>The Chairman of the New Patriotic Party\u2019s Legal Committee, Frank Davies, has criticised the reliance on Jomoro MP\u2019s expert in foreign law, whose testimony was key to dismissing the election petition in the constituency.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking on<strong> The Point of View<\/strong>, he felt the judge should not have been bound by the expert witness, who was an Ivorian lawyer, and insisted further that the \u201cman wasn\u2019t an expert.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you are a trained lawyer in C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire and you have practised for 15 years, that does not make you an expert in foreign law\u2026 15 years of practice does not make you an expert in foreign law.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is the Ivorian nationality code which is in contest so as to whether an expert has given evidence or not, we can not shy away from the judge\u2019s legal determination because, at the end of the day, you the judge are the arbiter of facts and the law,\u201d Mr. Davies argued further.<\/p>\n<p>The Jomoro MP, Dorcas Affo-Toffey, who stood on a National Democratic Congress ticket, faced the election petition because she was accused of having Ivorian citizenship ahead of the 2020 polls.<\/p>\n<p>The MP however argued that she renounced her citizenship before formally contesting.<\/p>\n<p>The court agreed with her, saying she did not have Ivorian citizenship at the time she filed her nomination forms to contest as an MP.<\/p>\n<p>In the judgement, the judge said the petitioner also did not demonstrate that the MP was not qualified to contest the 2020 parliamentary election and did not produce any evidence.<\/p>\n<p>The NDC\u2019s Director of Legal Affairs, Abraham Amaliba, downplayed the concerns raised by Mr. Davies.<\/p>\n<p>He felt the expert witness presented was credible enough because of his legal qualifications.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe brought somebody who is knowledgeable in Ivorian law, and any lawyer in any part of the world is knowledgeable in the laws of his country.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey didn\u2019t bring somebody to counter and contradict what he said, and that is what won the day for us,\u201d Mr. Amaliba said.<\/p>\n<p><div class=\"youtube-embed\" data-video_id=\"WozW441Ys5w\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Court throws out election petition against NDC\u2019s Jomoro MP | Citi Newsroom\" width=\"696\" height=\"392\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/WozW441Ys5w?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Chairman of the New Patriotic Party\u2019s Legal Committee, Frank Davies, has criticised the reliance on Jomoro MP\u2019s expert in foreign law, whose testimony was key to dismissing the election petition in the constituency. Speaking on The Point of View, he felt the judge should not have been bound by the expert witness, who was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1255633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1255631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1255631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1255631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1255631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1255631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1255631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}