The Country Director of the International Justice Mission (IJM), Anita Budu, has accused BBC’s Africa Eye of publishing factual and material inaccuracies in a documentary about the agency’s alleged involvement in a kidnapping scandal.

This follows the release of a documentary alleging that the NGO is wrongfully separating children from their parents under the guise of child trafficking rescue missions.

According to her, the situations covered by BBC Africa Eye’s production team are more nuanced than they are presented.

Speaking in defence of her organization on JoyNews’ Newsfile, Anita Budu said, “I continue to say that there are factual and material inaccuracies in the documentary that was presented. IJM’s main approach, when it comes to the issue of child trafficking and exploitation, I should highlight in Ghana and in other abuses across the world, is to support and strengthen our public justice system in being able to deal with this issue, and that cuts across a broad range of areas.

“And so there is training and capacity building, there is support and advocacy for resources and logistics, there is community work also being done and so it’s a wide range of areas or targets that we work towards. And so victim rescue or victim relief and restoration is just one out of a broad range of areas that we look at for successful work in this area.”

Madam Budu noted that the work of IJM is in direct tangent with Ghana’s Children’s Act and Human Trafficking Act, thus the impression created by the BBC’s Africa Eye of the organisation being purely target driven at the peril of children and poor families is wrong.

“The conditions are spelt out quite clearly in the Children’s Act and the Human Trafficking Act in relation to what constitutes reasonable work or work that a child can engage in. There are very specific guidelines in terms of what is light work, what is hazardous work for a child. And so this notion that a team just going in without accurate information or children just sitting around happily without any issues and there being intervention is completely wrong,” she said.

Anita Budu further stated that IJM is not directly responsible for the rescue missions.

She explained that the organisation liaises with Ghanaian authorities by reporting likely cases of child trafficking to the police for further investigation and subsequent rescue missions if proven true.

“Secondly, our team works in conjunction with agencies and so where information is gotten across from communities, we feel that there is the need for due diligence as much as we can do before passing it on to the police and other government agencies. And so there are enquiries that are made to be able to go a little bit deeper into the case.

“We can’t conduct an independent investigation, we can try and make sure that the information that we are bringing to the police is as accurate as we can. We don’t have the legal mandate for that, but we do have a team that tries to go through that information and sifts through so that the information that we’re bringing to the police is as robust as possible.

“And any information that is brought to the police and the DSW per their mandate, they also investigate before agreeing to move forward on an operation. In this particular case, the police had the information and did their initial enquiries before there was an agreement to move forward,” she said.

BBC’s Africa Eye has accused the IJM of removing some children from their families in cases where there was scarce-to-no evidence of trafficking and alluded that the aggressive tactics used may have been fuelled by a target-driven culture inside IJM.

“We found two documented cases of rescue operations in which children were forcibly, traumatically and unjustly removed and the children's relatives prosecuted as child traffickers,” the BBC says.

Africa Eye began investigating IJM after becoming aware of concerns over their work in Ghana and placed an undercover reporter on the staff at the charity.

As Operation Hilltop unfolded, the BBC monitored what staff were saying to each other on an IJM WhatsApp group. They also gained access to social services' documents relating to the case, giving Africa Eye an unprecedented insight into the planning, execution and aftermath of the IJM's rescue mission.

That evidence shows that while IJM was telling their partners in both the police force and social services that the four children had been trafficked, internally the charity had reached a different conclusion.

An IJM legal officer said in an internal message sent after the raid that the charity had already concluded there were "no elements of trafficking" in the case of Fatima and two of the other children taken that night from Mogyigna. Only one of the four cases, Fatima's cousin Mohammed, included elements of trafficking, according to the legal officer - a conclusion that is disputed by Mohammed's family.

But the mission to remove all four children, aged between five and 11, went ahead anyway because IJM concluded the children were at risk of being used for child labour, an issue that, although serious, would not have merited such an aggressive raid.

Referencing the cases, the IJM Country Director noted that all uncertainties concerning the situation were reported to the police.

“We detailed all the facts, the initial letter that was sent to DSW had all the facts of the children and the situations that they were in described in good detail. So no information about the uncertainties were withheld. We were very transparent with our government partners to say that this is where our concerns were,” she said.