Executive Director of The Death Penalty Project calls on First Deputy Speaker

This article was originally published in News Ghana, 21 July 2022.

Mr Saul Lehrfreund, the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Project, a United Kingdom based organization, has paid a courtesy call on Mr Joseph Osei-Owusu, the First Deputy Speaker of Parliament in Accra.

The call was to solicit the support of Ghana’s Parliament in the Organization’s effort to eliminate death penalty.
Mr Osei-Owusu, in his remarks, pointed out that Ghana was willing to be part of the international community in this regard by amending its law.

He said Ghana’s Parliament and Ghanaians would be guided in the course of the journey by Ghana’s culture and history; saying “we will listen to the voice of our people as we go out on this matter”.

On his part, Mr Lehrfreund pledged to assist Ghana’s Parliament to take death penalty off its statutory books.
He added that Ghana would join the majority of the world who had rejected capital punishment as an abuse of human rights, indicating that there were one 120 countries globally who had rejected death penalty with just few countries left to do so.

Mr Francis Xavier Sosu, the Member of Parliament for Madina, said Ghana had not executed anybody under the death penalty under the 1992 fourth Republican Constitution despite having it on its status books for a very long time.
“Our research shows that if we were able to do that, we would achieve 95 percent abolishing death penalty, and even if we would retain death penalty in the constitution, it would be for treason and high treason”, he stated.

Mr Lehrfreund was accompanied by Professor Carolyn Hoyle from the Oxford University, Meg Gould, Death Penalty Project, Mr Abdul-Razak Yakubu of the British High Commission and Madam Hannah Crothers Australian High Commission.