About ten days ago, Attorneys Rajvinder Bains, Mohinder Kumar, and R.S. Sidhu filed a habeas corpus petition, in the Punjab and Haryana High Court, on behalf of the mother of a victim of a disappearance in September 2003. The victim, 18-year old Baldev Singh, had run away with a girl. Both the girl and Baldev were persuaded […]
Zubair Ahmed of BBC speaks to orphans of the Gujarat pogroms, describing their ambitions, their education, and the deep psychological scars that persist. The children are currently enrolled at a special school where they can continue their education while also undergo rehabilitation:
The organisers of the school, run by the non-governmental organisation the Royal Education Society, […]
An article in the Hindustan Times today demonstrates the lingering suffering for victims of massacres in India and the problem of inadequate reparations. This article focuses on the inability of victims to repay government loans awarded after the violence. After arrest warrants were issued and property was attached for 1000 defaulters, the Bihar government has asked the […]
The Telegraph reports today about the completed report of the Asian Centre for Human Rights on education in India for the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The alternate report discusses the promotion of hatred against minority religious communities through history textbooks, focusing on textbooks prepared by both the Gujarat State Board and […]
The Telegraph reported yesterday on a forensic documentary that demonstrated that the fire on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, on February 25, 2002, was not a conspiracy, as alleged by the BJP in its justifications of the subsequent carnage against Muslims. Dr V. Sehgal, former director, Central Forensic Science Laboratory, and a member of Interpol, […]
Following a pattern of dismissal similar to the cases against the perpetrators of the 1984 pogroms against the Sikhs, the Gujarat High Court has dismissed the case against the accused in the Best Bakery case:
The accused in the Best Bakery case have reason to rejoice again. The Gujarat High Court has dismissed a reluctant state […]
BBC news highlights December 29 as the day when former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi won a landslide victory in the elections following the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi. Like the success of the BJP after the 2002 Gujarat massacres of Muslims, the Congress Party won the highest majority ever, despite (or because of?) […]
India also works to prevent UN interventions on human rights issues through the Like Minded Group (LMG). The LMG, which includes countries like China, India and Pakistan, works to counter the efficiency and work of the Commission on Human Rights. The South Asian Human Rights Documentation Center reported on some of their practices in 2002:
In […]
The newest addition to our website, www.punjabjustice.org, is an article by Ram Narayan Kumar titled: “The UN Human Rights Mechanisms and Issues of Accountability in Punjab.” Kumar describes the actions taken by different human rights mechanisms at the UN in response to human rights abuses occurring in Punjab, and how the Indian Government has responded. When the […]
A Tribune article describes protests by villages for the arrest of Nihang leader, Baba Ajit Singh Poohla (also misspelled as Phoola). During the field research of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances, they found that several survivors also implicated Ajit Singh Poohla in human rights abuses in conjunction with Punjab police officers. For example, in […]