Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Attorney- General and Minister of Justice, on Monday said he was in consultation with the Minister of Lands to find a lasting solution to the problem of land tenure in the country.
"Many of our customary laws on land are outmoded, and effective policies to address these issues have still not been put in place," he said, noting that causes of ethnic conflicts may encompass the rights of settler communities to have access to lands and chieftaincy titles.
Nana Akufo-Addo was opening a day's workshop organised in Accra by the Ministry of Justice in collaboration with the National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE) to review Ghana's 2002 Report on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
More than 70 participants from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice, NCCE, the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice, the Police Service, non-governmental and civil society organisations as well as chiefs and parliamentarians attended the workshop, which was sequel to the world conference against racism, racial, discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance held in Durban, South Africa from August 31 to September 7 last year.
The workshop offered participants the opportunity to engage in discussions to arrive at practical and effective measures to fight discrimination in all forms. Nana Akufo-Addo said conflicts that had occurred in the country over the years had been short. However, they had been "savage, involving systematic killing and butchering of male children and the rape of women".
"The remote causes said to trigger off these attacks have involved issues of either ethnicity, chieftaincy disputes or religious intolerance." He called on Ghanaians to collectively uphold the rule of law.
