Ghana's Human Rights Chief wants homosexuals to be killed

Behind the Mask storyThe newly appointed boss of Ghana’s Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Lauretta Lamptey has said she will not fight for the rights of homosexuals as the law deems their activities to be criminal.

Lamptey (pictured above) also said that the argument on Gay rights should be a legal discourse, rather than about human rights saying, “The main point that I wanted to make is that the debate has been about rights and that I think the real issue is the legal side of things and that it doesn’t make sense to me. There is some illogic in arguing for increased rights for homosexuals and at the same time saying that by law homosexuality is a criminal offence. How can we say it is criminal and then you want (CHRAJ) to go and protect the very activity that is criminal?”

She added “in my view I don’t think as a society we are ready to give homosexuals, lesbians, that whole category of people any of those kind of rights”.

When she first took up her appointment, the news website www.myjoyonline.com reported Ms Lamptey would be promoting the decriminalization of homosexuality. The report quoted her as saying that homosexuals have rights under the law and that she did not believe their activities should be criminalized.

Ms Lamptey has however denied making such a statement, “I did not advocate that homosexuality should be decriminalized. My view is that, it currently isn’t clear whether it is even criminal and that if the view of the society is that it should be [criminal] then, there should be a debate about that.”

Lauretta Lamptey, who was appointed by President John Atta Mills following the retirement of the acting Commissioner Anna Bossman, made her recent comments during an interview with XFM 95.1.

In her interview she said, “I think we have religious, moral, traditional and many barriers to that [homosexuality] and I don’t think we have to simply copy the Western world on everything because someone says, this is where you should be in terms of human rights of individuals.”