The Media Research Institute (MRi), a non-governmental organisation, has appealed to President John Dramani Mahama to grant a presidential pardon to Ms Camila Alhassan, the TikToker sentenced to a year in prison by an Accra Circuit Court for publishing false news against him.
“While the comments and actions of Camila are despicable by all standards, the one-year jail term is tantamount to killing an ant with a sledgehammer,” a statement signed by the Executive Director of MRi, Dr Daniel Nkrumah, and copied to the Ghanaian Times on Friday said.
MRi, which describes itself as dedicated to media research, media training and media development advocacy in Ghana, said that although Ms Alhassan had pleaded guilty to the charges against her, it found the sentence alarming and unduly harsh.
The institute pointed out that politicians who had lambasted the judiciary and senior public officials had often escaped without any form of prosecution.
“It is becoming alluring for law enforcers to apply two sets of laws: one that clears and cleans the powerful and another that drags the poor in the mud for walking on the very paths these politicians have carved,” the statement said.
According to MRi, Ms Alhassan’s incarceration highlighted the selective application of the law the kind of justice meted out to an unguarded woman who may have taken her cue from the example set by powerful politicians.
It said the case also underscored the gradual erosion of free speech as a right increasingly reserved for the powerful in society.
The institute maintained that the sentence was not only high-handed, but also a dangerous precedent that posed a real threat to free speech.
MRi further argued that selective justice, particularly against the poor, struck at the very foundation of democracy, stressing that democracy rested not solely on the authority of a powerful minority, but, more importantly, on universal suffrage and the resilience of the ordinary people whose votes granted that authority in the first place.
The institute called for greater decency in political conversations across both traditional and new media platforms, but cautioned that efforts to address such excesses should not themselves be extreme or heavy-handed.
“In that respect, we call on the government to capacitate the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) to enable it to undertake effective civic education on good political conduct,” the statement said.
BY TIMES REPORTER
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