We welcome delegates from the 56 countries forming the Commonwealth to the 66th Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference (CPC) that opened in Accra yesterday.
The CPC, being hosted by the Parliament of Ghana and the Commonwealth Parliament Association (CPA) Ghana Branch, comes whiletheSecond ECOWAS Parliamentary Seminar is being held in Winneba.
Those of us working on the Ghanaian Times see it as a great honour that Ghana has to host two important international events in less than a week.
We, however, think that honour places a great responsibility on the leadership of the country to ask the question why the choice of their nation for the events when
there are other countries one of whom could have hosted one of the events and continue to improve the positive things they are doing for the benefit of the country.
We are saying this not oblivious of the fact that venues for such events are chosen ahead of their hosting based on certain factors, including the regulations of the organisations.
Whatever the case is, Ghanaians must feel honoured by the ECOWAS and the Commonwealth.
But the talk of the honour done the country is just by the way; the crust of the matter rather has to do with what the events are meant for and how they can positively impact the lives of the peoples in the jurisdictions of the two organisations.
Yesterday, we published a story and an editorial about the ECOWAS seminar and we have done the same today in the case of the CPC.
We are happy to learn that there will be CPC workshops on matters of security, human rights, environment, economy, gender and other cross-cutting issues.
Without doubt, these are global issues but have country- and regional-specific impacts that must be particularised for the right impacts.
We are saying this because even though countries constituting the Commonwealth have equal membership status and are often classified as a single community, the individual countries have their own specific issues under the broad topics to be discussed.
Much as we do not expect the Commonwealth to usurp the duties of regional bodies like ECOWAS which have members in the Commonwealth, we appeal to the CPC to raise some of the regional problems and proffer solutions.
We can say without any iota of doubt that some of the interests of individual countries and international or regional organisations overlap somewhere and so it will not be wrong for the CPC to go on that tangent.
We also ask that the Commonwealth should increase its support particularly to its poor members.
We are particularly glad with the CPC theme – “The Commonwealth Charter 10 years on: Values and Principles for Parliaments to Uphold”.
While we do not want to belabour the point by listing the values and principles to uphold, we want to believe that all Commonwealth Parliaments know these and so would do their best to see them working in their respective jurisdictions.
Thus, we expect these parliaments to bear in mind that it takes only laws to formally regulate the negative acts of people.
Therefore, they have the responsibility to constantly look out for acts that can jeopardise the socio-economic progress of their peoples and enact laws to stop them in order to improve lives in their jurisdictions.
