West Africa Commission on Drugs to visit and meet in Ghana

Accra, 8 April 2013 – A delegation of the West Africa Commission on Drugs (WACD) is to visit Ghana this week (25-26 April) for a series of consultations.

Over the course of their visit, the delegation will meet with officials in charge of security, justice and health, as well as civil society leaders. They also plan to visit a drug treatment facility and a prison. The delegation will be led by Justice Bankole Thompson of Sierra Leone.

The second meeting of Commission will take place next week (29-30 April) at the Kofi Annan International Peace-keeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Accra.

The Chairman of the WACD, Olusegun Obasanjo, former President of Nigeria, will hold a press conference at the KAIPTC on Tuesday afternoon (30 April) to share their impressions of the visit and discuss the progress of the WACD with local and international journalists.

Country visits like this one, the second of its kind after Senegal, combined with experts’ fact-finding reports, will contribute to the WACD’s understanding of the situation in the region, and help it formulate its recommendations with a view to releasing an authoritative report due out next January, which will be followed by an advocacy campaign.

Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations and Nobel Prize laureate, launched the WACD in Accra in January 2013 in response to the surge in drug trafficking and consumption in West Africa and their impact on security, governance and public health.