The Weapons Are Exported, the Evidence Is Uploaded, and the Silence Must End: Defending the Right to Peaceful Assembly.

By Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams Human Rights Defender | UN Online Volunteer | Member, Amnesty International | Columnist.

By Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Feature Article The Weapons Are Exported, the Evidence Is Uploaded, and the Silence Must End: Defending the Right to Peaceful Assembly.

SUN, 01 NOV 2026

Every great struggle for freedom has had a street. The marches that broke apartheid, the Salt March that challenged an empire, and the school strikes that carried a young girl's demand for education to the world were all public assemblies. When a state silences the street, it silences the people's last remaining way of speaking when every other door has been closed.

I write as a human rights defender who believes that how a government treats its protesters is the truest measure of how it treats its citizens.

The Pattern Is Global, and It Is Documented

Over the past year, the evidence has accumulated across continents.

In August 2026, Amnesty International's Evidence Lab verified, through witness testimony, video, and photographs, that police in India used pellet-firing shotguns, tear gas launchers, grenades, batons, and electric shock devices against protesters. Delhi Police publicly denied any disproportionate use of force and repeated that position before India's Supreme Court, describing its handling of the protest as "professional." Amnesty states that its evidence directly contradicts that account. Amnesty also reports that Indian authorities have made no public commitment to investigate or prosecute any officer involved.

In Africa, the picture is no better.
In Tanzania, Amnesty reports that hundreds of people died and thousands were injured in the violent crackdown that followed the 2025 general election, and that not a single official has been criminally investigated. A UN estimate cited by Columbia University's Global Freedom of Expression project puts the death toll at no fewer than 700, including three journalists, during an internet shutdown between 29 October and 3 November 2025. On 26 June 2026, Tanzania's Home Affairs Minister then banned political rallies and mass gatherings.

In Kenya, a police watchdog counts at least 127 Kenyans killed during protests in June and July of 2024 and 2025, and the Missing Voices Coalition recorded 24 police-related killings in May 2026 alone, noting that crowd-control operations have become the leading source of police-related fatalities in the country this year. On 7 July 2026, police in Nairobi shut down roads and swarmed a tiny group of protesters who had managed to gather in the city centre.

These are not isolated tragedies. They are a pattern, and a pattern demands a systemic response.

The Standard the Law Already Sets

The right to peaceful assembly is not a favour granted by governments.

It is protected by Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and, in Ghana, by Article 21(1)(d) of the 1992 Constitution.

The UN Human Rights Committee's General Comment No. 37 of 2020 makes clear that states must facilitate peaceful assemblies, that force must be a last resort and strictly necessary and proportionate, and that firearms may be used only to protect against an imminent threat of death or serious injury.

The UN Human Rights Office's 2020 Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in Law Enforcement sets out the same logic for batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and electric devices.

The standards exist. What is missing is enforcement and evidence.

The New Frontline: Evidence in Every Pocket

For decades, police abuses were denied because victims could not prove them.

That has changed.
Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab and its Digital Verification Corps analysed more than 500 images and videos from protests over five years, verifying more than 100 incidents in which police deployed law enforcement equipment. The method is disciplined: investigators confirm the location, the date, and the authenticity of each piece of footage, identify the weapon, and then assess the lawfulness of its use against international standards. As Amnesty's Evidence Lab found in its tear gas investigations, open-source investigators verified the location and date of each instance and assessed its lawfulness.

This is why I am calling on citizens, journalists, students, lawyers, and civil society to become disciplined witnesses.

A video filmed safely, with the date, place, and context preserved, and handed to a credible verifier, can contradict an official denial in a way no press statement can answer. In India, the group behind the protests launched a platform for protesters to upload videos and photos from the crackdown.

Evidence collected with care is not only a record. It is a path to accountability.

The Missing Piece: The Trade in the Tools

Behind every canister of tear gas and every pellet round is a supplier and an export licence.

Amnesty's 2023 investigation, The Repression Trade, identified 23 major producers of less-lethal equipment and hunting ammunition whose products have been used unlawfully in protests in 25 countries. The organisation also observed that there are no agreed international regulations on the trade in tear gas and other riot-control agents.

Amnesty is candid about the limits of its findings: it is not always possible to trace precise chains for specific weapons, but the evidence strongly indicates longstanding patterns of irresponsible trade. Better transparency from exporters and states would close that gap.

The diplomatic groundwork already exists.
The Global Alliance for Torture-Free Trade was launched in September 2017 under the leadership of Argentina, the European Union, and Mongolia, and today has more than 60 member states. The UN General Assembly's omnibus torture resolution has repeatedly recognised the importance of all states introducing measures to prohibit the trade in inherently abusive law-enforcement equipment.

In 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture published a paper setting out her vision for a Torture-Free Trade Treaty, adding the weight of a UN expert to the call from a civil society network of more than 85 organisations.

A binding treaty has not yet been agreed. That is the gap I want us to close.

Ghana Must Lead by Example

I write from Accra, so I must also look at my own country.

Ghana's Public Order Act of 1994 requires organisers to notify the police at least five days before a demonstration. The Act has a legitimate purpose, but its application deserves scrutiny.

As recently as February 2026, the Ghana Police Service said it would enforce a High Court order prohibiting a planned "Stop Galamsey" protest, which had been granted two days earlier on grounds of public safety because the protest coincided with the President's State of the Nation Address.

Legal scholars have noted that police have relied on Section 1(6) of the Public Order Act to seek injunctions against holding protests. Analysts at the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development have warned that certain police actions in how they engage with protesters risk undermining the right to protest under the cover of enforcing public order.

I do not suggest that Ghana resembles the crackdowns I have described. I suggest that a democracy keeps its freedoms by examining its own practice before a crisis arrives.

When injunctions become routine and notification starts to function like permission, the right quietly shrinks. A nation proud of its democratic record should be the first to invite independent scrutiny of how its police manage the street.

What I Am Calling For

I call on governments, including Ghana's, to:

1. Respect and facilitate peaceful assembly as a right, applying the standards of General Comment No. 37 and the UN Guidance on Less-Lethal Weapons in domestic law, policing manuals, and training.

2. Establish or strengthen independent oversight bodies with the power to investigate police conduct on the street, publish findings, and refer officers for prosecution where force was unlawful.

3. Accept digital evidence from citizens and civil society as legitimate material for investigations, and refrain from internet shutdowns during protests.

4. Require public reporting on the procurement and use of crowd-control equipment, including tear gas, batons, pellet weapons, and electric devices.

I call on exporting and importing states to:

5. Adopt export controls that refuse licences where there is a substantial risk that equipment will be used against peaceful protesters, and publish licensing data.

6. Join the Global Alliance for Torture-Free Trade and support the opening of negotiations on a legally binding Torture-Free Trade Treaty at the United Nations.

I call on civil society, the press, and citizens to:

7. Document safely, verify carefully, and share responsibly, so that the truth of what happens on our streets cannot be rewritten by those who have most to hide.

The Last Word

Mandela reminded us that to be free is not merely to cast off …

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

Comments