Amnesty deplores impunity to HR violators in India
By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI, May 25: Perpetrators of human rights violations in India continued to enjoy impunity in many cases, most notably in Jammu and Kashmir and Gujarat, the Amnesty International report said in its section on excesses in South Asia.
In Gujarat, state authorities failed to bring to justice those responsible for widespread violence in 2002. “Security legislation was used to facilitate arbitrary arrests, torture and other grave human rights violations, often against political opponents and marginalized groups,” the report, simultaneously released in several world capitals including New Delhi, said.
The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government made a number of promises that, if implemented, could improve human rights. Socially and economically marginalized groups, such as dalits, adivasis, women and religious minorities, continued to face discrimination at the hands of police and the criminal justice system.
The report noted that relations between India and Pakistan improved during the year with talks and a series of confidence-building steps taking place.
“Impunity continued for most perpetrators of widespread rape and killing in Gujarat in 2002. During the communal violence Muslim women were specifically targeted and several hundred women and girls were threatened, raped and killed; some were burned alive,” the report said.
“Members of the security forces continued to enjoy virtual impunity for human rights violations,” the report observed, pointing to the excesses in Jammu and Kashmir.
It said that in April women members of the Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons were beaten by police when they demonstrated in Srinagar against continuing impunity for those responsible for ‘disappearances’ in Jammu and Kashmir.
While the state admitted in 2003 that 3,744 persons had ‘disappeared’ since uprising began in 1989, human rights activists believed the true figure to be over 8,000. No one had been convicted by the end of”Helvetica”B04.
In Punjab the vast majority of police officers responsible for serious human rights violations during the period of militancy in the mid-1990s continued to evade justice, despite the recommendations of several judicial inquiries and commissions.
In response to 2,097 reported cases of human rights violations, the National Human Rights Commission had ordered the state government of Punjab to provide compensation in 109 cases concerning people who were in police custody prior to their death.
“The culture of impunity developed during that period continued to prevail and reports of abuses including torture and ill-treatment persisted,” the report said. In August, the Indian Supreme Court issued a key decision in connection with communal violence in Gujarat state in 2002.
Bilqis Yakoob Rasool was five months pregnant when she was gang-raped and saw her three-year-old daughter killed by a mob in March 2002. She reported the rape and the killing of 14 relatives to the police. In January 2003, the police closed the case on the grounds that those responsible could not be found.
A subsequent investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) found evidence of a police cover-up. In April, 12 people were arrested for rape and murder. In addition, six police officers were charged with involvement in the cover-up and two doctors were accused of distorting post-mortem investigations.
It was then that the Supreme Court directed that the case be tried outside Gujarat. The trial was ongoing at the end of 2004.
The Amnesty report also focused on violence perpetrated by ‘opposition groups’.
There were reports of abuses – including torture, attacks and killings of civilians – by armed groups in a number of states in the north-east as well as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal.
“In Jammu and Kashmir, members of opposition groups were responsible for targeted killings of civilians. Victims included relatives of state officials and people suspected of working for the government. The use of explosives led to indiscriminate killings of civilians.
“In April, Asiya Jeelani, a human rights activist, and her driver were killed when her car carrying a team of election monitors hit an explosive device apparently laid by opposition groups opposed to the elections. Another team member, Khurram Parvez, lost his leg in the incident,” the report said. At least 23 people were sentenced to death and one person was executed. No comprehensive information on the number of people under sentence of death was available, but there was continuing concern that some prisoners had spent prolonged periods on death row, which could amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment. Twenty years after the Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide plant in Bhopal leaked toxic gases, the plant site had still not been cleared up and toxic wastes continued to pollute the environment and groundwater, the Amnesty said.
