Life after accusation: Forced internment, human rights violations, and the urgent case for criminalizing witchcraft claims in Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Accusations of witchcraft in Ghana are still causing forced displacement and severe human rights violations in impoverished, aging women, and other disadvantaged persons. This research is a sociolegal examination of the legal reaction to the protracted crisis in Ghana. Assisted by doctrinal methodology, this article critically examines Ghana's 1992 Constitution, the Criminal Offences Act, 1960 (Act 29), and the Criminal Offences (Amendment) Bill, 2022, against relevant international human rights obligations under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the ICCPR. To effectively implement the law, this study employs qualitative data gathered from eight lengthy interviews with survivors, representatives of civil society, religious and traditional leaders, and policymakers. The research indicates that the current criminal law of Ghana offers no clear assurances against unfounded accusations of witchcraft; the bill, nevertheless, makes an effort to close the legislative lacuna by designating malicious accusations as an offence, which is punishable with imprisonment and compulsory compensation. The development has been long due to fostering essential rights relating to security, dignity, and non-discrimination. However, the delay in presidential assent highlights the necessity for continued advocacy. This research demonstrates that the passage of criminalization, alongside systemic reforms, police training, community sensitization programs, and reintegration assistance, is key to bringing forced internment to an end and making Ghana's domestic law consistent with its constitutional obligation and international human rights commitment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".