Govt to tackle overcrowding in prisons

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo says the government is assessing various options to address the rate of overcrowding in the country’s prisons. 

He said options such as increasing non custodial sentencing were being considered and added that the government would soon take decisions on the matter and make them public. 

President Akufo-Addo said this when a delegation from Amnesty International called on him at the Jubilee House in Accra yesterday. 

Issues discussed at the meeting bordered on a wide range of human rights issues, including congestion in the prisons and the removal of death penalties on the country’s law books. 

President Akufo-Addo commended the group for its global fight against human rights and injustice and urged officials of the group to work hard to increase their membership from the current 6,500. 

He said he supported Amnesty International’s approach to the fight against human rights abuses by partnering the state to see how Ghana’s human rights profiles could be enhanced.  

According to him, the country’s human rights profile on the global scale does not matter if there are no concrete observations and compliance of human rights on the ground. 

President Akufo-Addo indicated that the government’s main concern was to work towards improving the human rights conditions on the ground to reflect the country’s values. 

On the issue of death penalty, the President refrained from stating his personal position on it. Rather, he said the matter would be debated extensively before a decision was taken. 

He said death penalty had not been used in the country for many years but once it remained in the law books, there was a need to decide whether to repeal it or not. 

BY YAW KYEI