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Severe punishment of Witch camps operators,accomplices key to end witchcraft tagging -U/E CHRAJ Director

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The Upper East Regional Director of the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) Jalaldeen Abdulai is calling for severe legal punishment for operators and accomplices of witch camps as a deterrent to end branding and dehumanizing persons as witches.

 According to him, the practice where so-called witch doctors set up camps for identifying witches under duress and exorcising them without legal trial must be outlawed.

Mr. Abdulai’s comments comes at the back of a petition to government by the Sanneh Institute to shut down a healing camp at Widina in the Pusiga district of the Upper East Region claiming to use sachet water for healing and for identifying and exorcising witches.

But speaking on A1 Radio’s Daybreak Upper East, Mr. Abdulai, appealed to key stakeholders to help eradicate the fast growing witchcraft menace in the region.

 “What we will do for these witch camps to be abolished and people reintegrated, let’s start punishing the people, those people who even come to stand by and watch the witch doctors do this, let punish them so that, they know that its better they withdraw from participation.

But, if a witch doctor is dehumanizing an alleged witch and you stand there without taking steps to stop him than you are an accomplice for abetment of crime. The law should take them on, so that, once we are running away from participation and encouraging people from doing this wrong thing, people will be afraid to tag them as witches”.

He described as unfortunate the branding and dehumanization of people as witches in modern times with a clarion call on government to close down witch camps.

“It’s so disheartening that, we still have people branded as witches and we decide to keep them in a deplorable and dilapidated structures and call them camps and all sort of treatment are been meted out to these people for them to confess as witches. These so-called witch doctors, who has given them that authority to arrest people and put them in camps and dehumanize them.

I don’t think any of our religions condone witches and once you are branded a witch, the person should be lynched or paraded round the town and be disgraced. If we have witches camps where are the wizards camps?.  I think that, it is wrong and we must all come together to stop it”.

Mr. Abdulai noted that, though Article 17 and 15 of Ghana’s constitution frowns against discrimination and dehumanization of all citizens, more could be done to outlaw witchcraft.

Mr. Abdulai admonished people or accused witches to timely report to the nearest police station or CHRAJ to prosecuted perpetrators to end the canker.

He called for psychological support for the victims accused as witches for proper integration into their respective communities.

Source:|A1radioonline.com|101.1MHZ|Frederick Yinbil|Ghana

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