90-year old woman’s murderers must be prosecuted – NGO
Accra, July 28, GNA – The Global Action for Women Empowerment, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Tuesday called on the Police Service to arrest the perpetrators of the murder of Akua Denteh, on July 23.
The Global Action joins voices of the civil society organisations who have mounted pressure on the Inspector General of Police to rise up to the occasion and be swift in bringing justice to the deceased, a 90-year old woman accused of witchcraft in the East Gonja District of the Savannah Region.
A statement copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra condemned the acts and described it “as cruel, barbaric, shameful and a slap in the face of rule of law and a clear violation of human rights for women”.
The statement expressed concern about the act and said allegations of witchcraft, especially against older women in the northern part of the country, were rife, and that the deceased became a victim after being tagged a witch by a supposed fetish priest.
Ghana is among the 189 states that ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, an international treaty adopted in 1979 by the United Nations General Assembly.
The Ghana Domestic Violence Act 2017, (Act 732), which protected women, especially the vulnerable, confirmed the assertion that the country had good systems and laws but weak in implementation.
“This helpless old-age woman just as others served her community when she was young with sincerity, truth, and hard work under difficult conditions but became vulnerable before her murder,” the statement said.
“If we cannot reward such people by taking good care of them in their old age, it is not justified in any way to add pain to their already disorganised world in the name of witchcraft,” it said.
“If we cannot protect the generation that suffered harsher conditions for us to get this far, then our generation is indeed a failure”.