HRF Monthly

Allahabad High Court order in Pilibhit extra-judicial killings case merits a substantive appeal

As early as 1993, the Supreme Court had castigated the Uttar Pradesh police. When the CBI authorities approached the local police as well as officers in the Home Department of the State Government, they did not receive the desired cooperation and case papers were not handed over to them.

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What was Allahabad High Court’s recent verdict on the Pilibhit encounter case of 1991?

ON December 15, 2022, the Allahabad High Court reduced the sentence of 47 policemen for killing ten Sikh men to seven years of rigorous imprisonment. The innocent Sikhs were killed in three incidents of extrajudicial executions (EJEs) in a single night in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district in 1991.

HRF Monthly

India’s continued refusal to ratify U.N. Convention Against Torture lacks substance

INTERNATIONAL LAW & WORLD AFFAIRS  — LIFE AND LIBERTY

NHRC’s radio silence on the absence of express definition of torture in Indian law and jurisprudence is deafening.

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THE Working Group on the United Nations (‘UN’) Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (‘UPR’) held its review of India on November 10. The delegation of India was headed by the Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta. At its 16th meeting, held on November 16, the Working Group adopted the draft report on India.

HRF Monthly

India played out a false dichotomy by emphasising domestic law over human rights at the Universal Periodic Review

India’s paranoia over the review of its human rights record by outside agencies reflects its insecurity, not  strength.

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THE Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta while presenting India’s fourth periodic report at the United Nations (‘UN’) Human Rights Council session in Geneva on November 10, stated that human rights defenders should conform to the law of land.

That is a no brainer. Unless, one had the moral courage of a Mahatma Gandhi, whose name Mehta is undoubtedly aware of, but is perhaps less conversant with Gandhiji’s teachings on the primacy of the moral law. “Gandhi’s sedition trial of 1922 was one that brought into sharp focus the conflict between obedience to the law of the land and obedience of one’s moral conscience in opposing an unjust law”, lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan aptly said in a lecture on Gandhi Jayanti in 2020.

HRF Monthly

The lack of compulsion to prove wrongdoing beyond a reasonable doubt is at the heart of the security laws’ enduring appeal

SEDITION & UAPA

The Indian State has conceived itself as a ‘security State’, and as the police apparatus is heavily overburdened, the fabricated arrests of members of minority communities are sacrifices made to create the appearance of relative safety and a protective State.

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THE Counter Terrorism Committee (‘CTC’) of the United Nations (‘UN’) Security Council met in New Delhi in the last week of last month. It adopted the Delhi Declaration which is State-centric, and had little concrete suggestions to protect and enhance citizens’ rights. The UN, as one wag underlined, was “nations united” against “people’s rights”.

HRF Monthly

The maya factor in Rohingya policy: Illusion and reality

Union Minister H.S. Puri’s sudden announcement about the housing of Rohingya refugee families in the National Capital Territory of Delhi is either inspired genius or the cat’s paw for the Hindutva dispensation to explore the process of enforced ghettoization, starting with the Rohingyas.

Disclaimer: This is an allegory. It is an entry for Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Many truths, deep analysis, some plausible guess work and healthy imagination arising from knowledge of the principal actors reveal a heady cocktail, the classic whodunit. It is advised that it be read with a healthy attitude of Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

What had Puri tweeted?

EARLY yesterday morning, the Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri, tweeted“India has always welcomed those who have sought refuge in the country. In a landmark decision all #Rohingya #Refugees will be shifted to EWS flats in Bakkarwala area of Delhi. They will be provided basic amenities, UNHCR IDs & round-the-clock @DelhiPolice protection”.

HRF Monthly

The Emergency, the first few days – A personal recollection

That day we spent only finding out who all had been arrested and who had escaped the police dragnet. The next day, I had wanted to walk down to the Delhi State Socialist Party office and our trade union office. I was cautioned not to go anywhere near it. It was feared that Gobind, the office caretaker, was a police informer.

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ON the morning of June 25, 1975, Than Singh Josh, the leader of the socialist trade unions in Delhi, and I had just reached Bangalore, as Bengaluru was then known. From the train station, we took an auto rickshaw to Subedar Chatram Road. We were going to the office of the Karnataka state Socialist Party. It was actually the office of  K.G. Mahewarappa, a lawyer, who was a long time socialist. We were going to sleep there for the week.

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