Reflections and Postulations on the Human Rights Advocacy Center

Written January 31, 2011

I have been working at the Human Rights Advocacy Center for about a week now, yet I feel as though I have just arrived. There are a few other NYU students working at the center with me, and we have been swept up in a whirlwind of cases and policies and clients and laws.

Now, please keep this in mind: I am a second-year undergraduate student. The closest I have come to having a legal background is appealing a traffic ticket last year in court. So to come into a city as foreign to me as Accra, with a legal system so different from that of America, and to be asked to research and take charge of cases is to approach a very daunting task. Many clients here at the center do not know English, but rather speak Twi or Ga. Their conflicts involve concepts as foreign to me as tribal rituals, intricate relationships between police and locals, and a legal system in which no citizens place their trust.

I have been assigned a few cases, whose details I am permitted from divulging. I want to give you a general idea of the work that I am doing, however. One case involves a clan in Ghana who is having a chieftaincy dispute which has resulted in police harassment of one family of the tribe. My second case is a prisoner who has been detained in jail without a trial for many years. This is a very common occurrence in Ghana and the HRAC has absorbed many of these cases in the interest of stopping these illegal oversights.

In addition, I am tasked with researching an organization which the Ghanaian constitution mandates will educate citizens on their rights, but which has been inactive for several years. The HRAC wishes to get the organization up and running in order to achieve freedom of information in Ghana. Finally, the other interns and I have each been asked to write articles for the first HRAC newsletter on various human rights issues in Ghana. I will be researching the situation of widows in Ghana, since they are often forced into inhumane and degrading practices. For example, in the North of Ghana, a widow is often made to sit naked on a reed mat for days or weeks after the death of her husband, and is subjected to sexual violence and rape by a man who will then claim the woman as his new wife.

As overwhelming as these cases seem, I am eager to dive in and make a difference in someone’s life. There is much for me to learn here, both about Ghanaian law and from Ghanaians. About five times a day, however, I have to stop myself from calling my third-year-law-student sister and appealing to her for advice!