The Chief Executive Officer of Guide and Save Adolescents Foundation, Madam Gifty Amissah, has bemoaned the indulgence of some state prosecutors in the practice of convincing victims and families of rape and defilements to seek out of court settlements.
According to Madam Amissah, some of the prosecutors go to the extent of convincing the victims to stop attending court proceedings after such mitigations, so that the cases are struck out of court for want of prosecution.
The Guide and Save Adolescents Foundation CEO Chief Executive Officer, who was speaking to Sompa FM and monitored by The Chronicle, parried the phenomenon, adding that it has become the new tactic adopted by the prosecutors to render their efforts useless, after painstaking investigations into the cases.
She said judges could not be blamed for the situation and demanded that stakeholders reason with her so that the practice would be nipped in the bud, to ensure that the rights of victims are protected.
“Some of these prosecutors go to the extent of seeing the families of these victims upon pleas of the suspects to kill the cases with ease after whatever exchanges in kind.
“As long as this subtle practice is allowed to go on, we are likely to lose most or all of our cases”, she noted and called for immediate reversal of the trend else the innocent victims would suffer”.
Guide and Save Adolescents Foundation, which operates around Effiduase communities in the Ashanti Region has seen more children, especially girls, who are victims of rape and defilement, being provided with vocations and re-integrated into various schools of their choice.
But Madam Gifty Amissah said the situation where some of these prosecutors are influencing settlement of such cases or thrown out of court is becoming very discouraging and a travesty of justice on the part of the victims.
