AFRICA REGIONAL DIRECTOR, RIGHTS OF THE CHILD FOUNDATIN
This paper aims to review some problems in Ghana, which is NGOs working in Ghana may hope the United Nation Convention on the Rights of the Child should come out boldly to ginger and vote money to support the prevention of child abuse and neglect programme in Ghana to save the minority group of children in this country.
CHILDREN IN CONFINEMENT IN GHANA
Juveniles who are detained under arrest or awaiting trail ("untried") are presumed innocent and shall be treated as such. Detention before trial shall be avoided to the extent possible and limited to exceptional circumstances. Therefore, all efforts shall be made to apply alternative measures. In Ghana preventive detention is nevertheless used, juvenile courts and investigative bodies are not given the highest priority to the most expeditions processing of such cases to ensure the shortest possible duration of detention. In Ghana untried detainees are not separate from convicted juveniles and hardened criminals.
In Ghana, there must be a provision for juvenile separate from those who awaiting trial. U.N. rules 75 and 76 provide that children should have the opportunity to make complaints and to be informed of the response without delay. The Ghana Police and Judiciary services should come together and put things in order to know where to put these children so that these children would not be involved in any criminal act after they have released.
Ghana is by most standards one the developing countries in Africa. It has one of the highest rates in the country of children living in poverty and children not in school or working.
In Ghana, Police Officers normally arrested the wayward children and put them into the cells where the hardened criminals were accommodated, prosecute them, after that, they sent them to main Prisons again.
Again and again the Rights of the Child Foundation has to intervene to seek the welfare of some of these juveniles who were detained, arrested or awaiting trial ("untries"). As stated earlier, all those courses came under the poverty and re-deployment of their parent with a token amount which cannot cater for the whole household for a year including their schooling as such. Secondly the soil of the country has also deprived and polluted with artificial fertilizers, which when you plant any fruits now would not yield proper unless you have money to undergo scientific way by irrigating the soil.