Editorial: What Crime Has GIS Committed To Warrant Attack By Bright Appiah’s CRI?

Child Rights International (CRI), according to The Ghanaian Publisher publication yesterday, has issued a scathing condemnation of a recent mass eviction operation carried out by the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS), describing it as a “chaotic and harmful exercise” that violated basic child protection protocols.

The said operation, conducted on May 16, 2025 in high-traffic areas of Accra – Kaneshie, Abossey Okai and Kwame Nkrumah Circle – resulted in the arrest of more than 2,000 individuals.

According to the publication, CRI estimates that at least 60% of those apprehended were children, many of whom are foreign nationals.

Executive Director of CRI, Bright Kweku Appiah criticised the approach taken by immigration officers, saying it ignored Ghana’s legal and moral obligations under both national and international child protection laws. “These children are not criminals”, he was quoted as saying.

Bright Appiah criticised the GIS for proceeding without the involvement of the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, nor any visible plan to care for the children post-evacuation.

“There was no coordination. No reintegration roadmap. No child-specific protocols. This operation lacked even the most basic safeguards,” he was quoted as saying.

The child advocacy organisation also warned that such unilateral operations may create diplomatic friction, particularly with the countries of origin of the affected children and called attention to Ghana’s porous borders that continue to allow undocumented minors into the country without scrutiny.

Since CRI is a child centred Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), The Chronicle does not have any problem with Bright Kweku Appiah’s outfit, except that his criticism must be fair and factual. The influx of these children mostly from our neighbouring countries to beg for alms on our streets is wrong in the first place.

Per our laws, begging for alms on our streets is illegal, let alone using children who should be in school to do so. In our opinion, these children lining our streets without going to school and exposing them to dangers such as car knock downs and kidnapping should have attracted the attention of CRI long ago, but this did not happen.

Apparently, Bright Appiah’s CRI did not see this as a violation of the affected children’s rights, neither did he use his ‘connections’ to solicit for funds to take these children out of the streets. Rather, immigration officers who are protecting the interest of the state have rather committed a crime and must be hanged?

Unless the violation that CRI is talking about did not happen in the presence of journalists who covered the evacuation of the children and their parents from the streets, we did not see any crime committed by the GIS in this whole exercise.

Indeed, we all saw on our television screens GIS personnel shepherding the children safely into the buses and transported them to holding places they had designated for them.

At the holding centers they were fed, apart from being given medical care. If in the face of all these humanitarian gestures, CRI still thinks the children were manhandled, then what kind of human rights violations are they talking about?

Ghana has its own challenges, yet day in and day out, these children and their parents, including people who are severely sick, are bussed into the country through unapproved routes by human traffickers.

Though this is not the first time undocumented migrants have been rounded up and deported, they keep coming into the country. Is Bright Appiah and his NGO telling us that Ghana as a country should sit down unconcerned whilst this is going on?

Again, is it the responsibility of the Republic of Ghana to spend the tax payers’ money to take care of these children? And should this even happen, what signal are we sending to their countries of origin? Is it not going to encourage them to keep bringing the children into the country?

We need to call spade a spade and not a big spoon – these children and their parents have broken our immigration laws and this is not the time to be talking about human rights at the time the said rights have not even been violated. Even the United States of America, which we all look up to when it comes to human right issues do arrest and deport children together with their guardians.

In our view, the fact that an NGO speaks about issues affecting children does not mean that every decision taken against children should be criticised.

Mr Bright Appiah, we believe, was not happy with the mess these children and their parents had created on our streets, but instead of supporting the action of the GIS, the latter has surprisingly become a punching bag. This, in our view, is not fair.

If we should not allow the children to grow up in the streets without education or any job skills, they would one day become armed robbers and terrorising people.

This is the reason why they must be sent back to their home countries because they are not here as people running away from civil wars, but rather economic migrants.

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