DEMOCRACY AND POLITICAL GOVERNANCE its own institutional budget. In effect, this means that Parliament can only reduce and not increase the allocations to a particular line item in the Executive branch budget proposal. Its own budget is thereby made subject to the item-by-item control of the Minister of Finance, and it has to appear occasionally before the Executive branch as a supplicant for funds. Parliament has nonetheless been trying to enforce the principle of Executive accountability to itself through its standing parliamentary committees. ii. Findings of the CRM Independence of the judiciary 61. Stakeholders generally feel that the Executive has, by and large, not interfered with the judiciary since the promulgation of the 1992 Constitution. The CRM's consultations however, pointed to a number of serious portents in some specific cases that challenge the country's good governance record. While the government has avoided interfering with judicial independence blatantly, more surreptitious methods of interference have occurred. For instance, in the so-called “poultry case” before the High Court of Ghana, the Poultry Farmers' Association took the government to court, challenging it on its failure to implement its own law introduced to raise tariffs for imported poultry products from 20% to 40%. The Association sought an order to have a mandamus designed to compel the government to implement the law. 62. After the Court granted the mandamus order and had fixed a date for the parties to agree on the mode of implementation, the government decided to fast-track a bill not by parliamentary fiat, but by suspending relevant standing orders that allowed it to repeal the law on an emergency basis. With the repeal of the Act, the Court order became otiose. A number of stakeholders feel that this amounts to interference with the judicial process and is a clear violation of the principle of separation of powers. It is therefore an affront to the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary. Effective legislature 63. During stakeholder meetings and, in particular, meetings with MPs in Accra, the point was repeatedly made that Parliament is neither effective nor independent of the Executive branch. Minority or opposition members of Parliament claim that, unlike the judiciary, Parliament is solely dependent on the Executive. The creation of the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs is used as a case in point. Members of Parliament have pointed to the large number of MPs who are Cabinet and junior Ministers, 88 in all, as evidence 31