EITD Research

    Cameroon Public Utilities Forum

Police/Gendarme 

The police and the national gendarmerie are to help maintain law and order and fight crime in Cameroon society. They are to protect life and property, preserve peace, prevent and suppress vice, detect and arrest violators of law, enforce the law and safeguard the rights and freedoms of every individual without discrimination.

The police/gendarme responsibilities require impartiality, fair treatment of all contending parties, and continuing allegiance to the rules expressed in law, which are to provide sufficient forms of control, to satisfy the parties in dispute. This entails intensive definition in the body of legal rules, which should compel the police/gendarme to thoroughly attend to requirements of the law in question.

But, there is a lot of ambiguity in the legal framework of Cameroon, even when it is enlarged to include relevant case law as well as statute law. The legal confusion is exacerbated by apparent interpretation deficiencies of courts and other authorities. Directions from other parts of state and society to police/gendarme officers in the execution of their duties is common. Several contending parties are often left in doubt of the legal basis of police/gendarme interventions, and much of the public is dissatisfied in the way the police and gendarmes perform their duties.

As we noted in our L & E (Legislative and Economic) Alert Volume 2 Number 4 of April 1999, some police/gendarme officers try to do their best. But many others basically harass the population continually. For example, they mount road blocks almost everywhere, round-up communities or quarters, during the day and also at night, under guise of identification paper checks instituted by Law No. 90/042 of December 1990. In the process, community or quarter tranquillity is often disrupted and endangered, many people are detained, security and order is disrupted, and much bribe is given and received. Despite the many arrests, cases of non-possession of identity cards or failing to present it upon request have scarcely been heard in court.

Reports on arbitrary arrests and detention, poor treatment of detainees, collection of money from the public for bail, and other forms of extortion by the police/gendarme are widespread and provoke public fury.