Leader of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP) and Le­gal Af­fairs Min­is­ter Prakash Ra­mad­har is call­ing for the im­me­di­ate adop­tion of a gen­er­al code of con­duct for politi­cians, in­clud­ing elect­ed of­fice­hold­ers.Ra­mad­har said that in the wake of the dis­missal of Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Dr Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh and the res­ig­na­tion of Tourism Min­is­ter Chan­dresh Shar­ma over al­leged in­ci­dents of as­sault on two sep­a­rate women.

In a state­ment, Ra­mad­har said the code should al­so be for mem­bers of state boards and state in­sti­tu­tions.He said politi­cians must evolve and sub­scribe to high­er stan­dards of pub­lic be­hav­iour and con­duct to pre­vent a re­peat of the re­cent in­ci­dents.He said the COP, which is a mem­ber of the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment, had al­ways ad­vo­cat­ed for a stricter ad­her­ence to high eth­i­cal stan­dards, be­gin­ning with a doc­u­ment it pro­duced in 2009 for dis­cus­sion with all po­lit­i­cal par­ties ti­tled "The Peo­ple's Char­ter".

That doc­u­ment "pro­mot­ed, among oth­er things, that mem­bers of gov­ern­ment be­come bas­tions of self­less­ness and in­tegri­ty and that in all things, the in­ter­est of the na­tion must not be sub­vert­ed by any self­ish mo­tive or agen­da."

He urged: "If we are to progress as a peo­ple and as a na­tion we must not be afraid to hold our­selves to a high­er lev­el of ex­pec­ta­tion and sub­scribe to a code that seeks not to stymie the work of those cov­ered but en­sure that what is done at the end of the day, builds a di­verse and de­mo­c­ra­t­ic so­ci­ety and one that has open­ness, trust, ac­count­abil­i­ty and ob­jec­tiv­i­ty at its cen­tre."

Ra­mad­har said the COP al­so sup­port­ed the cur­rent un­der­tak­ing by the Elec­tions and Bound­aries Com­mis­sion (EBC) to en­gage all po­lit­i­cal par­ties on in­sti­tut­ing a code of con­duct for elec­tions by the next gen­er­al elec­tion.