Justice, Black & White

No one more stridently denounces South Africa's violations of human rights than Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah. Last week he dispatched a recorded diatribe to an anti-apartheid rally in London, whose participants protested the law under which South African citizens may be jailed for interminably repeated 90-day stretches. The very next day Nkrumah armed himself with a measure that makes the South African statute look pale by comparison.

Since 1958 Nkrumah has wielded a law allowing his government to lock up any Ghanaian without trial for five years, merely by charging that the activities of the accused might prejudice national defense, relations with other countries or security. Last week the Accra Parliament shouted through an amendment authorizing the President to extend for an additional five years the detention period of anyone held under the original act. The amendment is believed aimed at 40-odd opposition leaders who have been in prison since November 1958, accused (but never convicted) of conspiring to assassinate government ministers and to poison the main Accra water reservoir.

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