HRF Monthly

The Emergency of 1975-77 and the long shadow it casts today

/ / HRF Monthly

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Perhaps the legal community would care to demonstrate how they make the fine distinction between an Emergency regime that subverts the Constitution and suspends fundamental rights, and other regimes that do likewise in a society that is bereft of due process of law and is yet considered an electoral democracy, however tawdry.

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WRITING in 2013, Justice Rajinder Sachar, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court asked the question as to whether the Emergency would have collapsed if the Supreme Court had decided the ADM Jabalpur case of 1976 differently. The court had failed to show spine and follow well-established law that in cases of habeas corpus, every imprisonment is prima facie unlawful and that it is for a person directing imprisonment to justify the act.

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HRF Monthly

Making sense of the Prime Minister’s offer to lift AFSPA in the Northeast

/ / HRF Monthly

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The AFSPA will figure as a major item in the discussion at the United Human Rights Council  in September this year when it discusses India’s periodic report, and then again at the United Nations Human Rights Committee in November this year.

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THERE are four audiences that the Prime Minister’s statement on the possible lifting of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 [AFSPA] in northeast India is aimed at. The first audience is the people of the North East. However, the people of Nagaland and Manipur have longer memories than the Prime Minister’s Office and the security establishment allow for. They are still awaiting the sanction for prosecution of Assam Rifles personnel pursuant to the Supreme Court’s EEVFAM judgment of 2016. Forget the detritus of Operation Golden Bird and Operation Bajrang in Assam.

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HRF Monthly

Detention and deportation of Rohingya refugees fly in the face of India’s obligations

/ / HRF Monthly

The new norms of an insensitive government

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In the absence of a legislation to deal with refugees, India continues to treat Rohingya refugees in an arbitrary manner, discriminating against them in relation to refugees from other nations, and inhumanely detains and deports them, in violation of customary international law and its own international treaty obligations.

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HASINA Begum, a Rohingya refugee staying in India, was deported to Myanmar on March 22 from the Indian border town of Moreh in Manipur’s Tengnoupal district. She had been in detention at the Kathua sub-jail in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir since March 6 last year. She had UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] registration no. 305-13C01783 as a refugee in India. Her husband and three minor children are still living in the most abject conditions in a slum in Jammu. The minor children have been inconsolable since the detention and deportation of their mother.

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HRF Monthly

AFSPA in the North East – the never ending trauma

/ / HRF Monthly

  – March 12, 2022

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act [AFSPA] was passed by the Indian Parliament on September 11, 1958. The Parliament was told it would last no longer than a year. In 2022, we are still waiting for that year to end.

The Act contains immunity clauses for the armed forces even if they are involved in violations of the right to life or torture.

In theory, the Union Government could give permission upon application for prosecution of armed forces personnel accused of offences. According to a question raised in the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament) in 2015, a total of 38 requests for the sanction of prosecution under AFSPA and the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 were made between June 1991 and March 2015. Of the 38, permission was denied in 30 cases while the remaining eight requests were pending as of March 2015.

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HRF Monthly

Extension of policing powers to BSF: comparable international experiences BYRAVI NAIR OCTOBER 25, 2021

/ / HRF Monthly
 OCTOBER 25, 2021

Northern Ireland’s Royal Ulster Constabulary experience offers a lesson to Indian lawmakers: the militarised policing of a local population by a centrally-controlled force that has been awarded extraordinary powers without accountability measures will likely result in human rights violation, explains RAVI NAIR.

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MOST modern democracies adhere to the policy of separation between the military and the police. Many nations have made limited exceptions for certain paramilitary forces.

Nevertheless, as Northern Ireland’s experience illustrates, the mixing of forces with inherently different mandates (armed combat versus law enforcement) and targets (enemy versus local citizen) is likely to do more harm than good.

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HRF Monthly

Shifting the borders inland: Policing powers of the Border Security Force

/ / HRF Monthly
OCTOBER 21, 2021
 
Amidst the recent decision to increase the jurisdiction of the Border Security Force in West Bengal, Punjab and Assam, RAVI NAIR examines the encroachment of Constitutional federalism by a union government gradually inching the country towards an authoritarian state.
 

Union government’s decision to extend the jurisdiction of the Border Security Force (BSF) to over 50 km in three states – namely, West Bengal, Punjab and Assam, from the barbed wire fence with Bangladesh and Pakistan, along with the grant of policing powers, is one more building block in the creation of a unitary authoritarian state.

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