Accra, May 31, GNA – Dr Esther Ofei-Aboagye, Chairperson of STAR Ghana Foundation, has commended Crime Check Foundation (CCF) and the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA) for their efforts to create awareness on decriminalizing vagrancy laws.
She said in search for social justice, it was important to get things right for all sections of the population, including the people living and operating on the streets, for various reasons and sometimes, through no fault of theirs.
Dr Ofei-Aboagye was speaking at the launch of the CCF’s OSIWA-funded “Decriminalizing Vagrancy Laws and Advocacy” (DVLA) Project in Accra.
The Project is to create an enabling environment for vagrants to know, claim and exercise their rights to end criminalization of poverty and homelessness in Ghana.
It is also to increase public awareness on vagrancy laws and their effects on vagrants in Ghana, increase citizen’s capacity and oversight to monitor vagrancy laws and their effects on the poor and homeless.
She said vagrancy, loitering and truancy were themselves not offences under the Criminal Offences Act.
She said with particular regard to children, “we have to be particularly careful to ensure that we do not assign deliquency or promote deviance when this could have been prevented.”
Dr Ofei-Aboagye said with the increased awareness of the circumstances that criminalize coping behaviours adopted by those without the requisite resources and opportunities, the country’s governance systems could respond more appropriately to meeting their needs.
“With this awareness also, we can sharpen our social protection interventions so as to ensure that those at risk are taken care of properly,” she added.
Mr Ibrahim Oppong Kwarteng, the Executive Director of CCF, said poverty and ignorance were key reasons many citizens violate the laws, get arrested and fined or jailed for various offences.
He said those people were imprisoned when they were unable to pay the fines imposed by the courts.
The Executive Director said what it meant was that Ghana’s justice delivery system appears to affect the poor people who constitute the majority of citizens, who were caught on the wrong side of the law.
Mr Kwarteng said many of the poor citizens, who were adversely affected by these laws were ‘vagrants’ or persons who engage in petty economic activities for their survival.
He said on December 4, 2020, the African Court on Human and People’s Rights came to their rescue through an opinion ruling following an application by the African Lawyers Union.
The Court held that vagrancy laws or laws which affected mainly the poor, contravention the African Charter of Human and People’s Rights and other international Human Rights Instruments that Ghana has ratified.
He said in their submissions, they defined vagrancy laws as laws which criminalized the status of individuals as being poor, homeless or unemployed as opposed to specific reprehensible acts.
He said the intervention would be implemented in 12 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies within Greater Accra, Central and the Ashanti Regions.
The action is designed to benefit the poor and vulnerable persons, who are the majority of the hawkers, head porters, traders and commercial drivers.
He said the Foundation believed that the Justice Sector Institutions and other State agencies were to promote human rights and the general well-being of the citizens.
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