Lawyers plan nation-wide protest against new penal code bill

Lawyers in Cameroon are planning a nationwide protest should the Senate okay the controversial penal code bill when it sits in a special session at 4pm today Tuesday, June 28, The Cameroon Journal has reliably gathered.

A senior member of the Cameroon Bar Council told us yesterday that the lawyers, who meet in a crucial assembly today in the economic capital Douala, are asking that the said bill be withdrawn and some sections of it reviewed.

The President of the Bar General Assembly, Barrister Nico Halle, when contacted did not refute the fact that lawyers were to meet in an enlarged executive assembly in Douala, but said their final reaction would hinge on whether or not Senate endorses the bill.

Our source added that the lawyers are also fuming that consultations that led to the drafting of the bill were not broad-based; hence some articles included in it are deemed to be obnoxious and capable of whipping up bitter sentiments in the citizenry.

If the plan by the lawyers to take to the streets goes ahead, it will follow two other such protests in Bamenda and Kumba.

On June 23, close to 100 Bamenda-based lawyers, dressed in their official regalia, marched inside the rains from the High Court premises Up Station, to Down Town, passing through City Chemist to the Commercial Avenue and back to City Chemist before making public a declaration.

According to one of those who fronted the protest march, Barrister Kemende Henry, representative of the Cameroon Bar Association and Council in the North West region, the motive of the protest was to make the public understand that the bill that was adopted the day before by the national assembly, is obnoxious because it protects the rich and discriminates against the poor. “We do not want society to blame us tomorrow for not condemning the law,” he had told The Cameroon Journal.

Yesterday, we gathered that lawyers in Kumba, Meme division, South West Region, also took to the streets to express their discontent with the bill that has raised general outrage among Cameroonians.

Photographs, which were later posted on social media, pictured the protesting lawyers, in their numbers, wielding placards with inscriptions that expressed their frustration.

The bill, it should be noted, has already earned the endorsement of members of the national assembly, when they literally hand-clapped it through in a stormy session in the evening of Tuesday 22 June.

Members of the SDF parliamentary group staged a walk out when their request to amend a section that had to do with immunity for serving government ministers, was quashed.