A new, non-governmental organisation, the Centre for Human Rights and Civil Liberties (CHURCIL), committeed to promoting the rights of remand prisoners, has been launched in Accra with a strong criticism of some police investigators.

CHURCIL is an advocacy, legal non-profit organisation devoted to safeguarding and advancing the constitutional, civil and human rights of all remand prisoners in the country.

Among other immediate things on its agenda, it aims to seek an amendment to the law on behalf of remand prisoners.

Addressing the media last Friday, Kojo Graham, the executive director, indicted agents of the security services as being the cause of the large number of remand prisoners in the country.

Mr Graham, a lawyer by profession with many years of international exposure at the International Criminal Court of Justice (The Hague and Sierra Leone), said that so far, the centre has interviewed 323 remand prisoners at both the James Fort and the Nsawam Medium Security Prisons.

He said most of the remand prisoners interviewed by the centre since launching its Aid Remand Project in September last year, have accused some police investigators of demanding money from them.

The inability of some of them to yield to investigators’ demands had caused their continued stay on remand, he said. He also cited the lack of logistics as another challenge of justice administration in the country.
"Because there are no cars to convey the remand prisoners to and from the courts, and no monetary incentives for the CIDs and the investigators for conveying them, the suspects are often dumped there until somebody remembers them," he said.

Mr Graham said out of more than 14,500 prisoners in the country, "one-third (4,833) number are remand prisoners, some of whom have been on remand for more than 15 years without trial.

"This is unacceptable and sheer abuse of the fundamental human rights of the people," he said, adding that the CHURCIL’s objective is to fight for the rights of the underprivileged and to ensure respect for human rights in the country.

The Aid Remand Project, is to help decongest the prisons by helping all those on remand to have their cases heard and for those who qualify, to be granted bail.

The project, he added, is also to assist the government to successfully implement its ‘Justice for All’ programme aimed at solving the problem of overcrowding in the nation’s prisons.

Out of the 323 remand prisoners interviewed, the centre was able to secure the release (discharge) of 11 of them while seven of them have been granted bail and another five have been convicted.

Meanwhile, 50 out of the 323 are yet to know their fate as the centre has not been able to trace their files and has therefore no information on them.

It is because of this that the centre is determined to seek amendment to the Criminal Procedure Act (Act 30) to make it illegal for the prisons to either admit remand prisoners without a warrant or detain them beyond the warrant time.

That, he said, will at least prevent the police and the CID from dumping prisoners at the prisons.


Source: The Ghanaian Times