CI-NEWS

Institutional News: “You call us toothless, we will accept for being toothless”, Human Right Chair s

2019-12-03

No: 459

Institutional News: “You call us toothless, we will accept for being toothless”, Human Right Chair states.

By Fonban Emmanuel.

Souvenir picture of the chair and members of the human rights commission

The inability of the National Commission on Human Rights and Freedoms to carry disciplinary sanctions against perpetrators and take the government to court has reduced the institution to barking dog without teeth.

Dr.Chemuta D. Banda, Chairman of the Commission, admitted this weakness

while releasing its 2018 annual report of the human rights situation in Cameroon on Thursday, 28 November 2019 in Yaounde.

The ceremony was attended by some officials of the government, representatives of diplomatic missions, religious and traditional rulers among many others.

Challenged by a participant who said the Human Right Commission was a toothless barking dog, the Human Rights chair admitted that the said participant was right to call the National Commission on Human Rights and Freedoms as toothless and they will accept for being toothless. He explained that the commission plays exclusively an advisory rule because it lacks powers to carry disciplinary sanctions against perpetrators unlike in other countries where human rights commissions can take the government to court.

He reassured the participants that the report was void of bias while stating that an efficient decentralized system of government could improve the human rights record in the country.

Speaking earlier, Dr. Chemuta D. Banda acknowledged the enormous challenges that his commission confronted as a result of insufficient financial and material resources. He said he was aware there were some cases of human rights violations that were not documented and were not equally condemned.

In a brief explanation during the presentation ceremony, he maintained that the escalating human rights abuses were emanating from the continuous use of violence to enforce public order.

Dr Chemuta Banda said the commission was preoccupied with the closing of schools in some areas of the English Speaking regions, extrajudicial killings, mob justice, judicial delays and non-enforcement of court decisions, a continuous decline of freedom of expression, poor detention conditions and many others.

Talking on the crisis in the English speaking regions, he said “I think that we can say that there are violations in human rights resulting from the continuous use of violence which has created the emergence of groups that we cannot even identify because we had the initial groups that were fighting to defend themselves but in addition to that, there are warlords who have constituted groups around themselves to make gains, capture people and obtain ransoms from people not in the agenda of the people who started fighting to obtain certain desires”, said Dr. Chemuta D. Banda.

He went further to admit that civilians have suffered indiscriminate punishment from Amba Boys and Defense and Security forces that always accuse civilians of being accomplices thus punishing them indiscriminately.

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Institutional News: “You call us toothless, we will accept for being toothless”, Human Right Chair s