…Over Human Rights Violation By National Security

By Adovor Nutifafa

Ghana’s National Security is in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Barring any unforeseen hitches and change of mind, a Ghanaian journalist will soon petition the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, human rights organizations across the world, civil society organizations including Ghana’s development partners over what he described as “persistent and flagrant violations of his fundamental human rights and civil liberties by Ghana National Security”.

The journalist, name withheld for now, who has been practicing the noble profession for over ten years named institutions such as Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Council, the Peace Council, the Ghana Bar Association, Ghana Journalists Association, West Africa Media Foundation, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Africa Union Commission on Human Rights as some of the organizations he intends to petition after consultations with his lawyers.

He said he would implore the above mentioned organizations to investigate the matter and call those who are involved in the attack on his life to order. The harassed but deviant Journalist told the authoritative Citizen Newspaper that National Security is mandated by the constitution to provide unfettered protection to the State, Government of the day and country’s citizens among other stipulated mandates enshrined in constitution.

But, he said when Colonel Gbevlo Lartey’s outfit is being engineered and remote-controlled by politicians and influential individuals in the corridors of power to shirk and trample on its functions with impunity and act as a repressive tool to intimidate, harass, subjugate and violate the fundamental human rights and other civil liberties of some of the citizenry, then it is worrying and should be a source of concern to progressive forces, democrats, adherents and experts of good governance and human rights advocates.

He said his planned petitions to the above mentioned organizations was triggered by the bugging of his personal mobile handset and subsequent eavesdropping on his private and official conversations by some hawkish elements within the National Security outfit because of his strident criticism of the current system, coupled with his paper’s critical stance against the President Mills led administration.

According to the journalist, his interaction with a retired security officer with remarkable grounding in intelligence and counter-intelligence who has worked with the security establishment for over 19 years and his (the retired security officer) subsequent appraisal and perusal of his (the journalist) telephone conversations shows clearly that a telecommunication company whose name will be made public soon has aided and given access to the National Security to bug his mobile phone line.

The retired security officer par excellence who declined to be identified is also of firm belief that the same telecommunication company has facilitated the installation of eavesdropping technology on the country’s National Security devices.

The retired security officer contended that the modus operandi of the eavesdropping technology is for the National Security outfit to intrude into the privacy of persons and listen to conversations of unfriendly voices and dissenting elements in the society, identify them and relay any information it perceived will not inure to the benefit of the ruling party and powerful power brokers in government for them to act.

The media practitioner also alleged that, National Security operatives have been trailing him (what is known in intelligence and security establishment as surveillance and profiling).

He said he is conferring with his lawyers about the possibility of taking legal action against National Security.

As at the time of filing this report, The Citizen Newspaper has gathered that the media practitioner was making frantic effort to reach Rupert Colville, the Spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the measures to take in order to submit his petition.

During the registration of SIM cards in the country, a cross-section of the public, political pressure groups and some civil society organizations were apprehensive that registration of the SIM cards which was at the behest of National Communication Authority (NCA) would lead to the tracking of identities of individuals that Government perceived to be its opponents.

But Communications Minister, Haruna Idrissu refuted this assertion saying, this was not the reason. But with the current development as narrated by the Ghanaian Journalist, it is certainly a test case.

Source: The Citizen Newspaper (thecitizen.news@yahoo.com) +233 27 731 4655