The Accra High Court has rejected the lawsuit that contested the validity of SIM card registration in Ghana.
The appeal contesting the validity of the ongoing SIM card registration initiative was dismissed on Wednesday (July 13, 2022) by the Human Rights Division of the High Court in Accra, which is chaired by Barbara N. Tetteh-Charway J.
One Francis Kwarteng Arthur filed the lawsuit, asking, among other things, for a directive to halt the ongoing SIM card registration procedure.
According to the court, none of the National Communications Authority's (NCA) acts were illegal and the SIM registration mandate was in the best interests of the general public.
This came after the applicant's attorneys' 2021 request for an injunction was denied.
You may recall that on December 9, 2021, the High Court in Accra rejected a request for an Interlocutory Injunction to suspend the SIM Card Registration process that was still in progress.
Following the NCA's filing of an affidavit in opposition, in which it was asserted among other things that the ongoing SIM registration activity was authorised by law, the petitioner decided to drop the motion for an injunction.
On July 31, 2022, the SIM registration procedure will come to a conclusion. Why Francis Kwarteng Arthur filed a lawsuit over the registration of his sim card
Francis Kwarteng Arthur, the petitioner, had asked the court to stop the sim-card registration process, claiming that it was illegal and infringed on his fundamental human rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of 1992.
The applicant filed a lawsuit against three telecom network carriers, including MTN, Vodafone, and AirtelTigo, as well as the NCA and the Attorney General (A-G).
But in a ruling issued on Wednesday, July 13, 2022, the court determined that the registration of sim cards was legitimate, in the public interest, and warranted.
Once more, the court determined that the applicant had failed to establish how the sim-card registration process had infringed his human rights and that his claims of a breach were only assumptions unsupported by the law or the facts.
As a result, the court denied the application because it lacked merit.
On Wednesday, Mr. Arthur, representatives of the NCA, and Attorney Patrick Larweh Kpalam, who represented NCA counsel Attorney Gary Nimako Marfo, appeared in court for the ruling.
Application
Mr. Arthur, a lawyer, filed a request at the High Court in November of last year to assert his fundamental human rights under Article 33 of the 1992 against the sim-card registration.
He said that, according to the legislation, only Ghana's National Identification Authority (NIA) was authorised to collect biometric data, hence the NCA's directive to telecommunication providers to do the same as part of the sim-card registration process was illegal.
He claimed that the NCA's order for the telcos to acquire his biometric information for sim-card registration was an infringement on his rights to administrative justice, property, speech, information, and privacy.
In order to prevent the telecommunication firms from obtaining, storing, or using his personal information for the sim-card registration, he asked the High Court to overturn the NCA's mandate.
Again, he asked the court to suspend the procedure by forbidding the NCA and mobile network companies from gathering his personal data for the sim-card registration.