US Withdraws from Cameroon Trade Deal Over Human Rights Abuses

US President Donald Trump released a statement to the United States Congress yesterday confirming that America will withdraw from a trade pact agreed between themselves and a number of Sub-Saharan countries.

In the statement, Mr Trump explains “I am taking this step because I have determined that the Government of Cameroon currently engages in gross violations of internationally recognised human rights.

“Despite intensive engagement between the United States and the Government of Cameroon, Cameroon has failed to address concerns regarding persistent human rights violations being committed to Cameroonian security forces.  These violations include extrajudicial killings, arbitrary and unlawful detention, and torture”.

Cameroon will now officially be excluded from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on 1st January 2020.

Many will hope this news will shed light on the ongoing ethnic violence in the West African country between minority Anglophone separatists to the West, the majority Francophone population.

For the last 3 years over 3,000 people have been killed as Cameroon slides towards civil war, as the government has attempted to suppress an armed insurgency.

The separatist movement took off in 2016 when English-speaking lawyers, students and teachers took to the streets to demonstrate what they saw as burning injustices within Cameroonian society committed by the French-speaking majority.