PRAWA, Relevant Stakeholders Advocate Decriminalization of Petty Offences

The Prisoners’ Rehabilitation and Welfare Action, PRAWA is partnering with other relevant stakeholders in the bid to ensure the decriminalization of petty offences and the reduction of discriminatory attitudes against marginalized persons.

Head, Enugu Office of PRAWA, Chioma Anuna made this known during a Media Capacity Building Workshop on the Decriminalization and Declassification of Petty Offences.

The project which is funded by the Open Society Initiative of West Africa, OSIWA, is also intended to ensure the strict application of standards principles of human rights in protecting the poor and promoting equality and fairness.

According to Anuna, while significant efforts have been made to transform criminal justice systems and outcomes across the region, the poor and other categories of marginalized persons remain vulnerable to violations of their fundamental human rights upon entering the system.

She said the effect of this is compounded and multiplied across different factions of the criminal justice chain, adding that laws that criminalize petty offences have the effect of punishing, segregating, controlling and undermining the dignity of persons on the basis of their socio-economic status.

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“Such violations extend to both the enactment and enforcement of criminal laws in relation to petty offenses, and to the policing of certain spaces, which actively seek to exclude categories of people from areas of public life, namely the poor,” she said.

She further noted that the enforcement of these laws also perpetuates the stigmatization of poverty by mandating a criminal justice response to what are essentially socio-economic issues.

She noted that the African Commission has recognized that the declassification and decriminalization of petty offences is an important human rights issue by adopting the Principles on the Decriminalization of Petty Offences in Africa in 2017.

“That became the latest development in a broader regional effort to articulate standards for acceptable human rights practices, specifically concerning matters of access to justice,” she said.

She maintained that the purpose of the adopted principles is to guide States on the decriminalization of petty offences in Africa in terms of Articles 2,3,5 and 6 of the African Charter.

Noting that the intervention is also currently happening in 21 other African countries, she called on the National and State Governments to adopt the principles of the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights as a way of decriminalization petty offences in Africa.