Togo: civil society meeting banned, once again

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Civil society questions the management of Covid-19 response and solidarity funds. In the photo, Victoire Sidémeho Dogbé, the Togolese head of government, is administered the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19 before officially launching the vaccination campaign in the country. © Peter Sassou Dogbé/RFI

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In Togo, the meeting of civil society, scheduled for Saturday, April 15 in Lomé, was again banned by the prefect of the Gulf (Lomé and its surroundings).

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This meeting was organized by a collective of civil society including the Togo-Debout citizen front to talk, he said, about the shortcomings revealed in the report of the Court of Auditors on the management of Covid-19 response and solidarity funds.

A previous meeting announced for April 1 had already been banned. At the microphone of our correspondent, Peter Sassou Dogbe, Professor David Dosseh, first spokesman of the Togo-Stand Citizen Front, finds this new ban shocking.

« We are particularly shocked by the ridiculousness of the arguments put forward by the prefect. With regard to the first ban, precisely, the prefect had demanded three signatures, whereas the law on demonstrations never mentioned this.

For us, this is the demonstration, once again, that the government is doing everything possible to prevent citizen debate on this fundamental issue of embezzlement, highlighted in the audit report of the Court of Auditors. We need to move forward.

We will certainly submit another request for a meeting and we are also thinking of appealing to the Administrative Chamber so that justice can still give us a clear answer on the arguments that the prefect presents to prevent our demonstrations, our meetings by deciding, for example, to send us his response a few hours before the demonstration, whereas the law clearly states that he must send his response 72 hours before, to give us time to react. »

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