Editorial
The Legal Resources Centre (LRC), a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), has called on Government to invest in State institutions with the mandate to protect the rights of citizens.
It said State institutions, especially the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), and the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), charged with the responsibility to protect and educate citizens on their fundamental human rights, and were under-resourced.
At a workshop at Zuarungu in the Bolgatanga East District of the Upper East Region, Mr Enock Jengre, a Rule of Law Specialist at the LRC said “The Government should support these institutions.”
“We are doing our bit as Civil Society Organization with talking and lobbying to get Government’s attention to their challenges,” Mr Jengre said.
The workshop was similarly organized in the Talensi, Bongo and Nabdam Districts, at the instance of the LRC in collaboration with CHRAJ, NCCE and the Ghana Police Service with funding support from the USAID.
The Daily Searchlight must once again state that we must express our continued abhorrence with the practice where we have allowed international aid organizations to sponsor activities for which we would have had no need, if we had thinking national leaders with ability.
The fact of the matter is that respect and insistence on acceptable human rights levels in Ghana, should have been par for the course, instead of the exception.
It is therefore offensive, that we have created a need for international support to teach our people about their rights, when central government should have been heavily protective of those rights.
Even more denigrating, is the fact that we have found reason to lament the lack of funding for organizations that we have created to protect our rights. We believe that it is the height of wrongness, for us to create a situation where we would seek foreign aid to create a platform on which we can tell government to provide for the needs of organizations that serve the needs of rights of the people.
That said, we support any call for government to make enough money available for the job of protecting rights to be done.
That said again, we believe that even with the little that is given these bodies, they are not doing nearly enough to protect all rights. It is why we must insist that whilst it is necessary that government provides necessary resources to our bodies dedicated to protect human rights, we should also insist that these bodies stand up and be counted.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of 16th June, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on
