The Annotated Criminal Offences Act Of Ghana

Jan Beek’s book explores everyday police work in an African country and shows that police officers, despite prevailing stereotypes about failed states and African police, produce stateness.

This book was delivered to me in one word: separation. I felt it drop in my spirit like a coin. I asked in my meditation, ‘what about separation, what about it?’ The answer is what you have in your hands now, reading. The title: The Church. Homosexuality. Human rights., hardly made any complete sense to me until I was able to liaise it with the mother word, ‘separation’. The title is punctuated for a purpose: each of the three nouns is supposed to be a full, separate, and sovereign entity. I mean each is, because each exists. However, the reality of society and relationships challenges this persuasion and thus leaves the reader, even me, to figure out whether it’s worth any effort to marry these sovereign bodies or not. The writer’s style is passably argumentative; it is purposed to allow the reader release him/herself into the billowing wave of opinions and facts on the subject, so as to arrive at the shore of conviction that is very personal and independent in nature. One could agree or disagree with me when I say that the of the three bodies constituting the title, human rights cannot be recognized as a sovereign entity because it is owned by others- all humans for that matter. The same claim cannot be made for the remaining two: Church is a person(wife) and sovereign; homosexual is a person and sovereign. Human rights therefore exist only as the middleman mandated to oversee the peaceful coexistence of the two. But how is this ‘peaceful coexistence’ to be attained, rather organically? For a start, the middleman has asked the church and the homosexual to move a step away from entrenched positions, identities, and ideologies to the common floor of ‘united sovereigns’. ‘Tolerance is the only way out’, says the middleman. But will the two commit to this tolerance method, or like some contracting states of the UN, will they resort to the game of unfaithfulness (it’s human right when it suits us, and when it’s convenient.) to get by? Whatever your view, whatever your prevailing conviction, whatever your deeply held belief, and whatever your well-thought through stance regarding the marriage of the two sovereigns, that, is what this book in essence is about: taking a stand!

Often overlooked by journalists and scholars, the police forces of the African continents are a significant and little-studied phenomenon. This book seeks to redress that lacuna. The studies span the continent, from South Africa to Sierra Leone, keeping a strong ethnographic focus on police officers and their work.

Historically, at English common law, the death penalty was mandatory for the crime of murder and other violent felonies. Over the last three decades, however, many former British colonies have reformed their capital punishment regimes to permit judicial sentencing discretion, including consideration of mitigating factors. Applying a comparative analysis to the law of capital punishment, Novak examines the constitutional jurisprudence and resulting legislative reform in the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, focusing on the rapid retreat of the mandatory death penalty in the Commonwealth over the last thirty years. The coordinated mandatory death penalty challenges - which have had the consequence of greatly reducing the world’s death row population - represent a case study of how a small group of lawyers can sponsor human rights litigation that incorporates international human rights law into domestic constitutional jurisprudence, ultimately harmonizing criminal justice regimes across borders. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the study and development of human rights and capital punishment, as well as those exploring the contours of comparative criminal justice.