Non-profit to sue Ghana Education Service
The Africa Public Policy Institute (APPI) on Wednesday said it will seek legal remedies for female teacher trainees prevented from writing final examinations due to pregnancy.
The Institute has therefore called on the Ghana Education Service (GES), the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ministry of Justice and Attorney General to reverse the decision.
“Indeed, APPI is instructing its legal team to take legal action at the Supreme Court for affected past students and those whose rights are being trampled upon right now.
“Unless steps are taken at once to compensate all affected women and publicly rectify this injustice to Ghanaian womanhood,” Professor Mike Oquaye, APPI Executive Director has said in a statement to the Ghana News Agency in Accra on Wednesday.
The Saint Monica’s College of Education at Mampong suspended five pregnant students from writing their final exams.
The APPI said there are about 38 public Colleges of Education (COEs) – former Training Colleges – affected, which fall in the category of Tertiary Educational Institutions.
APPI called for the application of rules which applied to all tertiary institutions and not to discriminate against COEs.
“If a College deprives a married woman of the right to get pregnant thus preventing her from taking exams, that Institution has seriously infringed on the fundamental human rights of that women,” APPI stated.
According to the APPI, the consequences of depriving a woman of the right to education are very grave. This regulation does not resolve any mischief. It rather seeks to plunge more Ghanaian women into poverty, misery, and illiteracy.
“Women should not be discriminated against, maltreated, or deprived of any privileges or opportunity whatsoever, by dint of the fact that they are pregnant.
“Indeed, Article 22 (1) of Ghana’s 1992 Constitution provides: Special care should be accorded to mothers during a reasonable period before and after child birth…”
According to APPI the action to disallow pregnant teacher-trainees to write their final exams is manifestly illegal and the Rules upon which such action is based are illegal and unconstitutional.
The statement said Article 27 (3) of the 1992 Constitution states in clear and plain words: “Women shall be guaranteed equal rights to training and promotion without any impediments from any person”.
“The present welfare state cannot provide the pregnant woman free maternal health with one hand and take away the right to education with the other hand.”
“It should be clear from the above that any decision that operates against women by virtue of their being women thus amounting to discrimination against them by dint of their being women is wrong and illegal.
“If in a mixed Training College, a male adult student impregnates a female adult student, why should the male adult student take his exams but the female cannot?
“And if a male adult student impregnates a woman in his hometown, will he be made not to take his exams because he is going to be a father? Then why should this haunt the female, just because of her sex?
“Incidentally, this discrimination does not even take into account the fact that the female student is married under our customary or other law”.
The APPI statement said any law enacted by any authority whatsoever, including an Act of parliament, which infringes on the Constitution, is null and void, illegal, otiose, invalid and of no effect.
According to APPI the law in the GES Manual is actually null and void….”the right to education is a fundamental human right and it is enshrined in the Ghana Constitution.
“We have suffered as a nation for too long as a result of several discriminatory practices against women”.
Source: GNA