Amnesty International will soon ask Parliament to legalise sex with animals – Speaker

Ghana’s Speaker of Parliament Prof Mike Oquaye has expressed fears that rights advocacy group, Amnesty International (AI) may soon start pushing for the legalisation of bestiality in Ghana.

The Speaker said that his comments stem from the way the advocacy group has been campaigning for the decriminalisation of homosexuality and the abolishment of the death penalty in the name of human rights.

Prof Oquaye said this when Amnesty International visited Ghana’s parliament with a call on the law-making body to repeal capital punishment from its statutes.

The Advocator Adviser to Amnesty International, Oluwatosin Popoola, indicated that the death penalty is not and has never been a deterrent enough to criminals in the world, and Ghana in particular.

Popoola further disclosed that 105 countries have so far signed to join the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty.
But in his response, Prof Oquaye wondered why a murderer’s right to life should be protected when he or she has already taken another person’s life from them.

“…the murderer has a right to life but the victim had a right to life in the first place and taken away by the murderer. Why should the murderer insist on his right to life and society protects his/her right to life when he violently abuses and takes away unilaterally without justification the life of another? I’m throwing these at you because you said you want to have a discussion with us and definitely these are the issues that will come out of any attempt to formally abolish the death penalty.”

Touching on the issue of human rights, the Speaker said his fear is that Amnesty International may in the future request for the country to accept homosexuality since it is acceptable in some countries.

“The way human rights conceptualisations are going these days, if we don’t take care, before we realise very soon everything has become human rights, even the right to have sex with animals…following what Tony Blair said, regarding which I personally wrote him a letter that if we did not go the homosexual way it was going to affect their aid to us. Honestly, in view of this, we Africans should have a concern about certain things that may appear merely intellectual but it becomes very practical.

“Is Amnesty International going to tell us many countries are doing that so you too now have to do homosexuality? You too have to do bestiality because it’s becoming a human rights issue in some countries and the right to do homosexuality is also becoming a human right? The right for a human being to sleep with an animal is becoming a human right. We are tired of some of these things and we must be frank about it. …I think these matters need to be seriously interrogated and then you may appreciate the thing more, but let me add that clemency is not coterminous with a right as we speak. This is one aspect of the jurisprudence that must also be clearly noted.”