By IKOME CHRISTIE-NOELLA EPOSI
Some 35 participants from civil society organisations in the South West Region have in a three-day capacity building workshop been schooled on human rights monitoring, reporting and observation of the legislative and municipal elections of February 9 2020.
Organised by the National Commission on Human Rights and Freedoms (NCHRF) alongside the European Union under the canopy of the project to improve the conditions of exercising freedoms in Cameroon (PICEF), the workshop took place from the January 28 to 30 2020 at the Mountain Hotel in Buea and was headed by the Regional Secretary of NCHRF/ Coordinator of the PICEF project, Dr Tambe Tiku Christopher.
The workshop was equally aimed at empowering human rights organisations to pursue a preventive role by observing and documenting practices, facts and behaviours which can lead to human rights violations and also to enable them give appropriate account of their actions on the field in a more professional way.
In an interview with The SUN, Tambe Tiku noted that today human rights defenders are called upon to cross-check all information prior to dissemination, to identify and analyse the underlying issues in alleged human rights violation and equally to suggest remedy proposals to such violations and prevent future ones.
Quizzed on what the stakeholders are expected to look out for especially as they go out in the days ahead to monitor the twin elections, the NCHRF regional secretary said “it is a fundamental concept in human rights and public administration that to participate in the functioning of the political life of your country is a right provided to every citizen without any exceptions and when we talk of elections, we are already anticipating some of the difficulties to be faced especially the violation of people’s rights to freedom of movement etc’’.
On aspects of insecurities especially in the two English speaking regions of the country, Tambe Tiku pinpointed that the “NCHRF is concerned about people’s right to participate in the political life of the country and at the same time they are also concerned about the political climate under which such elections are conducted and it is our wish that these elections are conducted under conditions that are favourable so that people are not disenfranchised because of measures that have been put in place by the elections management body to fight insecurity and in the process disenfranchise people.”
To the election stakeholders he mentioned that it is a collective responsibility, a process which involves several other stakeholders who must participate in one way or another to ensure the success of the process and not only to be left sorely in the hands of the election management body (ELECAM), the human rights institutions including CSOs who all have an interest in the process. “All hands must be put on deck to ensure the success of the process otherwise we would have betrayed all those who fought in order that we should live in freedom” he concluded.
According to some of the participants; Lawrentine Onege of Remedy Organization and Clarkson Obasi, executive director of HELP OUT Buea, the workshop which is very timely will help them acquire skills on human rights monitoring and reporting especially as the twin elections draw near. They expressed gratitude to the NCHRF and the European Union for such a brilliant initiative by organising such a workshop to monitor not only elections but also some aspects of human rights violation.
The workshop precedes the multi-year plan of action of the observatory and elaborated workshop which took place in the nation’s capital Yaoundé from January 21 to 23 2020.
Observation missions were performed for which road maps were drafted and adopted at the close of the training/workshop.