Ghanian Official Discusses Human Rights

Author: Mallika Rao

This past Monday night, an audience at the Robert A. Jones '59 house was treated to the eloquent words of Betty Mould-Iddrisu, chief state attorney of Ghana. The event was conceptualized by Kathryn Boateng '05 and sponsored by the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, the Religion Department, the Women's and Gender Studies program, Middlebury College United Nations Children's Fund (MCUNICEF), UMOJA and PALANA house. Iddrisu's somber message of Africa's excessive human rights violations juxtaposed with her intense enthusiasm made for a surreal experience.
Iddrisu heads the international law division of the Ministry of Justice in Accra, Ghana. Aside from co-chairing the African Women Lawyers Association - a body of regional women lawyers working to promote female status in Africa - she is also a consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organization based in Geneva. She instituted the teaching of intellectual property law at the University of Ghana and is Ghana's former copyright administrator.
One of Iddrisu's main cries was for the "domestication of laws." She warned that while "Africa looks very good in the world of international treaties, without domestication there is no real obligation to implement them." Because of this abstraction of human rights resolutions, laws simply become ideals. She reminded us that here in America, where human rights laws exist and are enforced on a domestic level, "you rarely see the most fundamental breaches of human rights we see on a daily basis in Africa."
Iddrisu's knowledge lies mainly in the politics of sub-Saharan Africa. However, her general facts about the entire continent, for instance that it contains 34 of the world's 47 least-developed countries, allowed for a larger perspective of the situation. She brought up other daunting aspects of the legal system, including Africa's problematic pluralism. The three venues of jurisprudential law, statute law and customary law render issues such as polygamy and inheritance obscure. The net outcome is often that a woman is lost in the loopholes of the system and discarded altogether.
Yet Iddrisu is a symbol of potential hope. Her predictions of where "Africa will fall short," uttered while waving a bejeweled hand and flashing a smile, epitomized the paradigm of Africa's condition. Despite the seeming desperation of the situation, many people continue to make change within the system - and as Iddrisu exemplifies, with a necessarily positive attitude. In response to the question of how she stays optimistic, Iddrisu exclaimed reassuringly, "We're fighters, girl. And I'm not a rare bird in Africa. There are many like me."