The Parliamentary Commission had filed an application against a Kampala-based lawyer, Severino Twinobusingye and the Attorney General seeking to be permitted to go to the highest court, which would determine whether Parliament is a mere agency of government bound by the advice of the Attorney General.
The Constitutional Court has thrown out Parliamentary Commission’s intended appeal to the Supreme Court challenging the January 2012 ruling that blocked it from being party to the oil sector probe case.
The Parliamentary Commission had filed an application against a Kampala-based lawyer, Severino Twinobusingye and the Attorney General seeking to be permitted to go to the highest court which would determine whether Parliament is a mere agency of government bound by the advice of the Attorney General.
However, Justices Augustine Nshimye, Stella Arach Amoko and Remmy Kasule dismissed the application as incompetent in law. The judges ruled that having taken a decision that MPs had no powers to order Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi and ministers Sam Kutesa and Hillary Onek to resign from their cabinet posts, the appeal by the parliamentary commission had been therefore rendered useless.
The judges noted that the subject matter of the intended appeal, that is the constitutional petition, had been disposed of by five justices of the said court and both Twinobusingye and the Attorney General, who were parties to the petition, were not pursuing it in another court.
This means that efforts by the Parliamentary Commission to establish the limits in the relationship between the three arms of government have hit a dead end.
On January 19th, a panel of five Constitutional Court Judges led by the Deputy Chief Justice Alice Mpagi-Bahigeine, threw out an application filed by the Parliamentary Commission that sought to be co-joined as a respondent to the suit filed by Twinobusingye, saying it was constitutionally unsustainable.
The other respondent to the suit is the Attorney General Peter Nyombi.
The other judges on the panel were Remmy Kasule, Stella Arach Amoko, Steven Kavuma and Augustine Nshimye.
But on January 24th, the Parliamentary Commission indicated that it would appeal challenge the decision in the Supreme Court.
The case arose in October last year when Twinobusingye sued the Attorney General seeking to block Parliament’s investigations headed by Bungokho South MP Michael Werikhe Kafabusa into the bribery claims in the oil sector.
The adhoc committee was investigating Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi alongside Internal Affairs Minister Hillary Onek and Foreign Affairs Minister Sam Kutesa.
The trio was accused of allegedly receiving bribes from foreign oil exploration companies as kickbacks. Western Youth MP Gerald Karuhanga was the whistle blower of this saga after he tabled documents to that effect before the 9th Parliament during the Special Oil Debate.