16. The Applicants state that the initial draft of the Bill styled as ‘Hate Speeches Establishment Bill 2019’ meant to criminalize hate speech with a penalty of a death sentence attached to it. 17. They claim that due to national and global outcry over the purport of the Bill, particularly the penalty attached to it, the Respondent’s Legislature dropped the proposed death sentence penalty attached thereto, and reverted to other lesser sentences, without dropping in any manner the criminal elements proposed in the evolving law. 18. The Bill, according to the Applicants, has gone through the entire hog of the legislative procedure, having been adopted in its first and second readings, and now sailing through the final stages of adoption for it to be enacted into law. 19. They state that the Bill, if passed into law, would serve as a means to cow, curb, shortchange and circumvent free speech within the polity to censor the press, and create barriers or obstacles to free exercise of the right to speech, including the right to receive information, and the right to express opinion as established by law. 20. They claim that the Bill, if passed into law, has the potency to drastically denigrate the guaranteed right to receive information, to express and disseminate opinion as enshrined in Article 9 of the African Charter, Article 19 of the ICCPR, and the UDHR respectively, as the said law would be completely disproportionate to the goals and objectives of the African Charter, and the other mentioned international instruments. 21. They submit that the Respondent cannot shy from its obligations under the African Charter and have its Legislature enact laws that will frustrate the rights guaranteed therein in its articles and render useless the goals and objectives of the instrument of which it voluntarily entered into and of which is it bound. 6