A member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) communication team, Awal Mohammed, has criticised the Ghana Police Service for what he describes as selective justice and heavy-handed treatment of opposition voices.
Speaking on Prime Insight on Joy Prime on Saturday, September 27, Mr Mohammed said: “There is no way in our laws that says that if I insult you, I can be arrested by the police, handcuffed, and sent to court. It is not in our statutes like that.”
He insisted that while he does not support insults in politics, free speech must not be criminalised. “I am against insults in any form or shape to anyone, not even a public officer. And I have never done that in my political life. But decriminalisation of free speech is important, and our constitution is clear on that,” he stressed.
Mr Mohammed compared recent arrests to practices from the 1990s when journalists were jailed for their writings. “The high-handedness with which the police are treating some people within the NPP fraternity belongs to the ’90s. The last time I saw that was in 1998 when Malik Kwaku Baako and Alhaji Haruna Atta were jailed for 30 days. That was why President Kufuor, after he won the endorsement, repealed the criminal libel law,” he recalled.
Citing recent cases, he described the arrest of Central Regional Chairman Kwame Baffoe Abronye as harassment. “Abronye’s crime is that he spoke against the IGP. Shamelessly, look at what the judge said that we are not equal before the law. A judge who was due for retirement even attacked the constitution, using dictators as justification to incarcerate Abronye just for free speech,” he said.
He added that the charge sheet itself showed that Mr Abronye was targeted for his words. “The charge sheet said he made some incendiary comments against the IGP. Why was he arrested? Because he said the IGP is the dumbest he has ever seen. There is nothing in the law that criminalises this,” he said.
Mr Mohammed also pointed to the arrests of social media personalities Yayra and Fantic Comedy, claiming they were unfairly humiliated.
“They used their platform for people to make comments. The police arrested them, put them in handcuffs, took videos, and gave them to NDC communicators before publishing them on their Facebook page,” he alleged.
He further accused the police of selective justice, contrasting the treatment of NPP members with that of NDC figures.
“Over 200 police officers were deployed to guard Abronye in court for a misdemeanour charge. Yet when we called for the arrest of Chief Azoka after he threatened to cause a by-election, the police issued a press statement without publishing his face. NPP communicators are humiliated publicly, NDC people are shielded,” he claimed.
Mr Mohammed said that the police must apply the law fairly to win public confidence. “If you want to engender trust, publish the faces of convicted people, just as you do with NPP members. Otherwise, it looks like selective justice,” he said.
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