Rev. John Ntim Fordjour, Member of Parliament for Assin South and a leading proponent of the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, has called for the immediate reintroduction of the controversial anti-LBGTQ bill on the parliamentary order paper.
Speaking in an interview on Wednesday, October 29, 2025, Rev. Fordjour alleged attempts to weaken the legislation, insisting that the bill must be passed in its original form.
“We have noticed some attempts and some manipulations going on in an attempt to water down the Bill. All the clauses, every essential component of the bill in the shape and form as was passed, which the NDC wanted President Akufo-Addo to assent to, it is the same bill; we have not changed anything. It is the same bill we have submitted; it is the same bill we will pass. I heard some commentary suggesting that some people are meeting some influential people, and they’re having some high-level agreement. We’ll resist every attempt to change the key components of the Bill. We will pass it in the same form as we passed it before,” he stated.
Rev. Fordjour also criticised what he described as attempts to remove the bill from the order paper without a valid justification, emphasising that it has met all procedural, internal, and constitutional requirements.
“For it to be disingenuously taken out from the order paper, and we don’t get to hear any very cogent excuse, and all we hear is the rhetoric around it; that is not what we are interested in. What we are demanding is that today, the Day of our Lord, we want to see the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill advertised and brought back on the Order Paper because it has met every internal standing order, procedural requirement, and constitutional requirement. And so it must come back on the Order Paper, it must be laid for first Reading for the consequential processes to be undertaken. We don’t want to subject this matter to further debate and for them to contradict themselves.
“NDC has demonstrated clearly that they want to run away from this bill, but 93% of Ghanaians are still insisting that this bill is as important to them as it was from 2021 to 2024. So we’ll insist that the bill must be reintroduced, back on the order paper today, beyond the rhetoric. The Speaker has ruled. The ruling is to the effect that there is nothing that should prevent the bill from being laid,” he said.
The Speaker of Parliament, Alban Bagbin, has clarified that the bill must be reintroduced in the current Parliament, noting that all pending business from the 8th Parliament ceased to exist when that Parliament was dissolved. This ruling comes after a week of debate, during which the Majority Leader argued that the bill had already been passed by the 8th Parliament and therefore did not require reintroduction.
Speaker Bagbin, however, firmly disagreed, insisting that the dissolution of the 8th Parliament nullified all unfinished business, including the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill, asking for it to be formally laid and read in the new Parliament before proceeding.
