WUNRN
Full Article: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=16523&LangID=E
Ghana - UN Special Rapporteur on Torture
to Conduct Follow-Up Visit to Ghana to Assess Implementation of Recommendations
after 2013 Visit, as on Conditions of Detention, Prayer Camps, Mental Health
Care
GENEVA (29 September 2015) – United Nations Special Rapporteur Juan E. Méndez will carry out a follow-up visit to Ghana from 4 to 7 October 2015, to discuss and assess the level of implementation of the recommendations issued after his first mission to the country in November 2013. “I will focus on the challenges I encountered in Ghana, such as critical issues in the criminal justice system, including conditions of detention, and mental health-care practices, including the treatment and living conditions of persons held in psychiatric hospitals and prayer camps,” said the independent expert charged by the UN Human Rights Council with monitoring and reporting on the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
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https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/10/inhuman-dimension-ghanas-prayer-camps
GHANA – THE (IN)HUMAN
DIMENSION OF DETENTION IN GHANA’S PRAYER CAMPS – WOMEN & GIRLS
At Heavenly
Ministries Spiritual Revival and Healing Center, some people with presumed
mental disabilities lived in buildings with cubicles for each resident and were
chained to walls. They could not leave the cubicles without permission of the
staff at the prayer camp.
©
Shantha Rau Barriga/Human Rights Watch
Director,
Disability Rights – ShanthaHuman
Rights Watch – October 10, 2014
Ambamfo Ofori Atiemo says
that prayer camps in Ghana deserve a closer look, as they are a supposedly
compassionate, faith-based response to mental disability. Human Rights Watch’s
research suggests otherwise – people with mental health conditions are treated
inhumanely in these camps and this must end.
Imagine being taken to a camp by a family
member, chained to a tree or a concrete structure, sometimes without cover, and
forced to urinate, bathe, sleep, and defecate in the spot where you are
chained. Imagine being shackled there for days at a time, deprived of food and
even water, with no access to adequate health care and no real way of getting
out. This is the reality for hundreds of people with real or perceived mental
health conditions whom we met or saw in a number of prayer camps in
Ghana.
People, like Victoria, a 10-year old
girl who lived in the Nyakumasi Prayer Camp in the Cape Coast Region. She
was covered in dirt, chained to a tree and subjected to
the same fasting regime as the adults. She had a serious
skin condition with crusting and bumps on her arms, but it was left
untreated. The leader of Nyakumasi Prayer Camp told us, “The Lord will heal the
people through me. Through fasting…I use to heal the people.”
Ghana has several hundred prayer camps, which
are believed to have emerged in the 1920s, although little is known about their
history, numbers, or operations since they are not state-regulated. While
prayer camps in Ghana often serve as a refuge for people seeking spiritual
healing and peace of mind - for example, for people who may have a terminal
illness or lost their job – some of these camps place people with mental
disabilities in an inhumane and degrading environment. To my mind, chaining
someone to a tree is not the kind of refuge anyone would seek.
In Ghana and other countries around the world,
it is widely believed that mental disabilities stem from being cursed or
possessed by demons, not from a psychiatric condition. With such a view comes
the notion that people with mental disabilities such as schizophrenia or
depression are sub-human, worthless and violent. That misperception needs to
end.
In fact, the World Health Organization
estimates that one in four people in the world will be
affected by mental health or neurological conditions at some point in their
lives.
In 2011 and 2012, Human Rights Watch
visited eight prayer camps in
the Greater Accra, Central, and Eastern Regions, interviewing more than 50
people.
We met Aisha, a woman in her
mid-50s, in the Mount Horeb Prayer Camp in the Eastern Region of Ghana. She was
only allowed to bathe twice a week and had to defecate in a bucket in a room full
of other women. She told me that she would have preferred treatment in a
psychiatric hospital, but camp administrators refused to let her leave.
Ghana’s 2012 Mental Health Act creates a system
through which people with disabilities can challenge their detention in
psychiatric hospitals. However, the law does not apply to prayer camps, leaving
people with mental disabilities without legal remedies to seek release. In most
prayer camps, people with real or perceived mental disabilities may only leave
when the prophet deems them healed.
Prayer camps are run by privately-owned
Christian religious institutions with roots in the evangelical or Pentecostal
denominations. Any criticism of these camps is not linked to their religious
roots or spiritual nature of the camps, as some such as Ambamfo Ofori Atiemo
might believe. Rather, the critical issue is the
inhumane treatment of people with mental disabilities forced to stay there.
The United Nations Expert on Torture also observed extremely disturbing practices in the two
prayer camps he visited. He documented cases of shackling and forced fasting
for people with psychosocial disabilities or in some cases neurological
problems, including children. He observed men, women and children in Edumfa
Prayer Camp who were shackled to the walls or floors of their cells. The building
holding adult males contained 16 concrete cells laid out like cattle stalls.
There was a separate building for
women and juveniles, with 10 people chained to the floor, including a
14-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, who exhibited symptoms not of a
psychosocial disability, but of a neurological disease that required
specialized treatment and medication.
Inter-religious councils, faith-based
organizations and the Ministry of Culture and Chieftaincy can play an important
role in addressing these abuses in prayer camps. They should create
guidelines to monitor operations of prayer camps affiliated with religious
councils. They should also sensitize traditional healers and religious leaders
on the manifestations of mental disability, and the rights of people with
mental disabilities.
The government of Ghana along with community leaders should lead the charge to ensure that no one with a disability is mistreated in any one of these prayer camps. It is not about religion. It is about humanity.